M. Stanley Livingston

Livingston was born in Brodhead, Wisconsin, on May 25, 1905, the son of McWhorter Livingston, a minister of religion, and his wife Sarah Jane. Sarah was a member of the Ten Eyck family, an influential New York family whose Dutch origins date back to the 1640s. He had three sisters. The family moved to California when Livingston was five years old, and he grew up in Burbank, Pomona and San Dimas. His father became a high school teacher and principal. His mother died when he was 12 years old, and his father later remarried. Livingston thereby acquired five half-brothers. After graduating from high school in 1921, Livingston entered nearby Pomona College, intending to major in chemistry, with a double major in physics and chemistry. Tileston arranged for him to then enter Dartmouth College with a teaching fellowship. and stayed on for another year as an instructor. == Cyclotrons ==

the 27-inch cyclotron at the Radiation Laboratory in 1934. During that year, Livingston applied to graduate schools for teaching fellowships, and was accepted by both Harvard University and the University of California. He accepted the latter and returned to California. a topic suggested by Ernest Lawrence, who had noticed that ions of mass M and charge e moving in a uniform magnetic field B circulate at a constant frequency \omega independent of energy: : = { eB \over Mc } In theory, therefore, if a particle traversed an electrode with a voltage V N times, it would acquire energy of NeV. Stanley's task was to verify if this would work. In January 1931, Stanley managed to do just that, using a voltage of 1 kV to accelerate hydrogen ions to 80 keV. At Lawrence's prompting, Stanley quickly wrote up his thesis and submitted it in April 1931 so that he would be eligible for an instructorship the following year. In the cyclotron, they had a powerful scientific instrument, but this did not translate into scientific discovery. In April 1932, John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton at the Cavendish laboratory in England announced that they had bombarded lithium with protons and succeeded in transmuting it into helium. The energy required turned out to be quite low—well within the capability of the 11-inch cyclotron. On learning about it, Lawrence wired the Berkeley and asked for Cockcroft and Walton's results to be verified. It took the team until September to do so, mainly due to lack of adequate detection apparatus. Between 1932 and 1934, Livingston authored or co-authored over a dozen papers on nuclear physics and the cyclotron, but he felt overshadowed by Lawrence, and did not think that he had gotten sufficient credit for his part in designing the cyclotron, for which Lawrence would receive the Nobel Prize in Physics in November 1939. Livingston therefore accepted an offer of an assistant professorship from Cornell University in 1934. He also teamed up with Bethe to demonstrate for the first time that the neutron has a magnetic moment. Livingston recalled that Bethe: Physicists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) had decided that they too needed a cyclotron, and Robley Evans hired Livingston to build a cyclotron there in 1938. Livingston became an instructor at MIT the following year, and an assistant professor the year after. The cyclotron was completed in 1940. During World War II, he worked with the cyclotron for the Office of Medical Research of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), producing radioactive isotopes of phosphorus and iron that were used as tracers in medical experiments. The result of this research was new methods of stabilizing blood, so that it could be shipped to the troops in remote theaters of war. In 1944, Livingston joined Philip Morse's operations research group at the Office of Naval Research, and he worked in Washington, D.C., and London on radar countermeasures to the U-boats. == Later life ==

Livingston returned to MIT soon after the end of the war, but in 1946 a consortium of universities including MIT created the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island, New York, as a facility for carrying out Big Science research activities that were beyond the resources of a single academic institution. Morse was appointed as Brookhaven's first director, and he asked Livingston to take charge of building an accelerator for the new national laboratory. It was decided that it should be a new type of accelerator known as synchrotron that had been proposed by Edwin McMillan in 1945. Isidor Isaac Rabi in particular argued that it should be more powerful than any planned by the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. Livingston was unable to stay at Brookhaven to see the Cosmotron project completed because he faced losing his tenure at MIT, and elected to return there in 1948. The advantages of strong focusing were then quickly realised, and deployed on the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron, which achieved 33 GeV in 1960. The National Accelerator Laboratory, was renamed the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in 1974, was established in Batavia, Illinois, in 1967. Like Brookhaven, it was run by a consortium of universities. == Awards and distinctions ==

• Honorary degrees from Dartmouth College (1963), Hamburg, Germany (1967), and Pomona College (1971). • Enrico Fermi Award from United States Department of Energy (1986) (posthumous) == Notes ==