During his first post-doctoral position at
Stanford University (1949–1950), he derived the
Rosenbluth formula, which was the basis of the analysis used by
Robert Hofstadter in his Nobel prize-winning experimental investigation of
electron scattering. Hofstadter refers to this in his 1961
Nobel Lecture: "This behavior can be understood in terms of the theoretical scattering law developed by M. Rosenbluth in 1950". In 1950 his doctoral advisor
Edward Teller, who is considered the father of the
hydrogen bomb, recruited Rosenbluth to work at
Los Alamos. Rosenbluth maintained this position until 1956. The research he conducted at Los Alamos led to the development of the H-bomb. In 1953, Rosenbluth derived the
Metropolis algorithm, based on generating a
Markov chain which sampled fluid configurations according to the
Boltzmann distribution. This algorithm was first presented in the paper "
Equation of State Calculations by Fast Computing Machines", coauthored with his wife
Arianna Rosenbluth (who wrote the first computer program to implement the method),
Nicholas Metropolis,
Augusta H. Teller and
Edward Teller. This now-famous paper was cited in
Computing in Science and Engineering as being among the top 10 algorithms having the "greatest influence on the development and practice of science and engineering in the 20th century." He and Arianna subsequently introduced the configurational-bias Monte Carlo method for simulating polymers. By the late 1950s, Rosenbluth turned his attention to the burgeoning discipline of plasma physics and quickly laid the foundation for many avenues of research in the field, particularly the theory of
plasma instabilities. Although he continued to work on plasma physics for the remainder of his career, he often made forays into other fields. For example, around 1980, he and coworkers produced a detailed analysis of the
free electron laser, indicating how its spectral intensity can be optimized. In 1956, Rosenbluth left Los Alamos to join an atomic energy firm, General Atomics. In 1960, while still employed with General Atomics he joined the faculty of the
University of California at San Diego. Later, he joined the
Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton, New Jersey (1967). In 1980, he went to the
University of Texas at Austin. He then went back to University of California at San Diego in 1987. In 1993, he retired from UCSD became the chief scientist of the central team for the International Tokamak Experimental Reactor, where he worked until 1999. He maintained a high productivity rate throughout his entire career. Indeed, only a few years before his death, Rosenbluth discovered the existence of residual flows (so-called
Rosenbluth-Hinton flows), a key result for understanding turbulence in
tokamaks. ==Additional information==