1997 JR Macdonald Lab
Departmental Newsletter Article

Note that no attempt has been made to maintain the links in older newsletters.

Pat Richard

FUNDING

The J. R. Macdonald Laboratory has just completed another exciting year of research. We have submitted our renewal proposal to the Department of Energy for research beginning in February 1997. The indication from DOE is that we will receive 1.955 million dollars for FY-97. This represents a 2% increase in funding which is good in view of the budget cutting efforts in Washington. This is the third year of our three year research proposal and therefore during the upcoming year we will be very busy proposing and justifying research to be done over the next three years, and entertaining an external scientific review panel, if things are done as in the past.

Lew Cocke, Dea Richard and I made a trip last January to DOE, Germantown, to visit with Patricia Dehmer, the new head of the Office of Basic Energy Sciences to familiarize her more with the Macdonald Laboratory and to make a case for funds to help support our outside user program. We did make some progress in this direction in that she said we will be eligible for such funds in FY-98 if we meet certain criteria. The other very positive thing that came from the visit is the acquisition of 200 thousand dollars from Robert Marianelli, head of the Division of Chemical Sciences, for replacing our computer-based data acquisition system. Kevin Carnes has been busily involved with the development of the new system which will replace the four existing DEC computer based systems we obtained in 1985. You can ask him about the details. The prototype has been successfully tested and the new computers are on order. We hope to have the new system in operation during January '97.

The laboratory also has received an FY-96 grant for 395 thousand dollars from the DOE Accelerator and Reactor Improvement Projects (ARIP) fund. This is our second grant from this fund. Tom Gray and Martin Stockli are busily using these funds to keep the tandem-LINAC and the CRYEBIS facilities at a state-of-the-art level. Martin with the help of Paul Gibson continues to make many improvements to CRYEBIS in order to accommodate new experiments and new users. They have developed new high charge ion beams and recently installed a fast pulsed beam extraction system. Tom Gray with the help of Bob Krause, Mike Wells, and Al Rankin, has used these funds to upgrade the tandem with a new improved column resistor chain, a new 64 position foil stripper, and a pumping system in the terminal of the accelerator. A new upcharge system is in the planning stage. Kevin with the help of Steve Kelly has installed on the LINAC the new RF electronics designed by Argonne National Lab. Vince Needham can condition and ready the LINAC much more efficiently with the new system. A new computer control system for the LINAC is also in the planning stage. There is more but no room here to discuss. Come visit us and I promise you a very interesting tour of the Lab.

VISITORS

As I reported last year the number of visitors, collaborators and users continues to rise. Since many of you know these people and since many are return visitors, a somewhat complete list follows:

  • Steve Lundeen, Charles Fehrenbach, and Dan Fischer,
      Colorado State University
  • Emanuel Kamber, John Tanis, and Peter Zavodszky,
      Western Michigan University
  • Hiro Tawara,
      Nagoya, Japan
  • K Langbein and H Haseroth,
      CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
  • W Morz and E Woryna,
      Warsaw, Poland
  • J. Krasa,
      Prague, Czech Republic
  • M Terasawa and T Sekioka,
      Himeji Institute, Japan
  • Bob DuBois,
      University of Missouri-Rolla
  • Jean-Pierre Briand, B Borsoni, and M Ramassamy,
      University Pierre and Marie Curie, Paris, France
  • Mark Pieksma and Wuchun Wu,
      Oak Ridge National Lab
  • Gisela Dreschhoff,
      University of Kansas
  • S L Varghese,
      University of South Alabama
  • Eugene Rudd,
      University of Nebraska

    RECENT NEWS

    Itzik Ben-Itzhak has been on sabbatical leave in Israel and is expected to return to KSU in January. Lokesh Tribedi, Research Associate, returns to the TATA Institute, India, in March '97. He is working with Pat Richard and Eugene Rudd and has completed a set of experiments on the ionization of atomic hydrogen by high velocity high Z bare ions.

    Harald Braeuning from the University of Frankfurt is a Feodor-Lynen Fellow at KSU working on the Berkeley ALS experiments using the COLTRIMS apparatus to study complete photoionization and Compton scattering final state momentum distributions. Lew Cocke, Kevin Carnes and Pat Richard are the KSU collaborators on the primarily Frankfurt-KSU-Berkeley experiment. Gabor Toth, a graduate student with Pat Richard, will be graduating in January '97 and has accepted a job at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo. Theo Zouros is on sabbatical from the University of Crete since June '96. His wife Maura is taking classes here and working toward a degree. Two of Theo's students, Emmanouil Benis and Marotese Voultsidou, are here at KSU working with him on setting up a new electron spectrometer system which he hopes to take to various accelerator facilities as a user. Hans Wolf and Wania Wolff are here on sabbatical leave from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. They are working with Lew Cocke and Mohammed Abdallah on projection electron and recoil momentum spectroscopy using the CRYEBIS. Emil Sidky is a new Research Associate working with C D Lin. Emil received his degree with Ugo Fano and spent some time in Europe prior to coming to KSU. For the fifth consecutive summer we have hosted graduate students from the University of Dresden, Germany. Hilmar Preusse spent three months training with Martin Stockli on the CRYEBIS in the JRM Lab. Also for the fifth consecutive year, the Macdonald Laboratory hosted undergraduate students from around the United States who were participating in the NSF REU summer trainee program (8 students worked in atomic physics).

    I would like to tell you about the research being pioneered in the JRM Lab, but due to space limitations, all I can say is if you want to know about the creation of elliptic atomic states, talk to Professor Brett DePaola; if you want to know about molecular breakup and lifetimes of exotic molecular ions, talk to Professor Itzik Ben-Itzhak; if you want to know about the emission of electrons at the saddle point of the ion-ion potential in low energy collisions, talk to Professor Lew Cocke; if you want to know about resonances in electron-ion scattering determined from ion-atom collisions, talk to Professor Pat Richard and/or Professor Chander Bhalla; if you want to know about e-,2e- reactions in ion-atom collisions, talk to Professor Siegbert Hagmann; if you want to know about secondary recoil ion atom collisions, talk to Professor Tom Gray; if you want to know about ions scattering from surfaces, talk to Professor Uwe Thumm; and, if you want to know how hyperspherical coordinates can be used to describe three-body and four-body Coulomb systems, talk to Professor C. D. Lin. These are just a few items of interest. Come visit us and we can have a great time discussing these exciting scientific endeavors going on in the Macdonald Laboratory at Kansas State University.

    Pat Richard, Cortelyou-Rust Professor,
    Director, J. R. Macdonald Laboratory
    December 1996

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    This document prepared by Vincent Needham at vneedham@phys.ksu.edu.