Raphael Littauer

Raphael Max Littauer (November 28, 1925 – October 19, 2009) was an American physicist who was a longtime Professor of Physics and Nuclear Studies at Cornell University. He was involved in the development of several particle accelerators there, in particular the 10 GeV electron synchrotron at the Wilson Synchrotron Lab in the late 1960s, where he devised a distributed, multiplexed control system for it, and the Cornell Electron Storage Ring (CESR) in the late 1970s and early 1980s, where his scheme to create pretzel-shaped orbits to increase the number of particle bunches in circulation contributed significantly to CESR having the highest luminosity of any accelerator of its era. Littauer was also known for his teaching, including the design, implementation, and installation of one of the earliest and most successful classroom response systems. An active opponent of the Vietnam War, he led a group at Cornell that published a well-regarded study on the nature and effects of the U.S. air attacks in Southeast Asia. In 1991 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society and in 1995 he received the Robert R. Wilson Prize for Achievement in the Physics of Particle Accelerators.

Early life and education Littauer was born in Leipzig, Germany, on November 28, 1925.

He attended the University of Cambridge beginning in 1943. During this time he worked as an assistant in the famed Cavendish Laboratory.

Littauer left England for the United States in 1950,

Career as physicist Accelerators and positions

Littauer's arrival at Cornell in 1950 was in order to do work on an electron accelerator at Cornell's Laboratory for Nuclear Studies, which had been founded after World War II by scientists returning to academic life following their efforts at Los Alamos. The director of that laboratory, Robert R. Wilson, was instrumental in bringing Littauer there. At the time Cornell had a 300 MeV electron synchrotron, which was followed in 1952 by a new 1.3 GeV synchrotron.

In 1954, Littauer departed Cornell to work on a synchrotron at the General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, New York.

Later in 1968, Cornell's Wilson Synchrotron Laboratory saw the dedication of its new 10 GeV electron synchrotron, the largest and most powerful such one in the world, with Littauer highlighted as one of the people who helped develop it. The ring was built underneath Schoellkopf Field and other athletic facilities on campus. As part of his work, Littauer created a time-sharing, distributed, multiplex control system for the synchrotron that helped reduce both the initial and ongoing costs of the system. This involved having multiple bunches of particles in a storage ring, but introducing electrostatic separators at key places in the ring such that two counter-circulating beams are displaced in eccentric and opposite directions, thereby limiting the number of collisions in a rotation and increasing the number of bunches that can be in circulation.

Overall, the physicist Maury Tigner has described Littauer as someone who was "very much interested in accelerators and was ... a pioneering controls designer and builder."

In 1974, Littauer was elected chair of Cornell's department of physics, a department which held 47 faculty members at the time. He remained in that position for three years. In 1958, he was one of several groups that published results regarding nucleon resonances, finding and establishing the properties of the state latter known as N(1520). It allowed the instructor to pose multiple-choice questions to the students, from which they would push buttons at their seats to anonymously register what they thought the answer was, giving the instructor immediate feedback as to students' level of understanding of the material being presented. He continued to use it in all his classes. Although other audience response technologies emerged over time and were utilized at Cornell, Littauer's system was still in place and in use within Rockefeller B some three decades later. Littauer also became a national council member of the Federation of American Scientists. This including him being one of a number of physics faculty who stated they would not engage in teaching activities during the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam in October 1969 and instead encouraged others to join them.

Starting in May 1971, Littauer headed the Air War Study Group, which was sponsored by Cornell's Center for International Studies and consisted of a 19-person group of professors and students who investigated the nature of the air attacks being conducted by the United States in the Vietnam War. as part of this Littauer made trips to Washington to interview participants.

The study was subsequently revised and updated and published as The Air War in Indochina in August 1972 by the Beacon Press. By now the study group comprised some 21 scholars encompassing a number of different academic fields.

In a September 1972 op-ed run by the Los Angeles Times News Service, Littauer decried the air war as "remote, inefficient and indiscriminate", especially in the use of aerial gunships, cluster bombs, napalm, and B-52 Arc Light saturation bombing. Littauer did acknowledge the advent of "smart" laser-guided bombs as an improvement, but noted that their existence was not lowering the amount of conventional bombing being done. Decades later, the study was still being used as a source for analyses of the U.S. air effort.

Later years and honors In 1991, Littauer was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

In 1995, Littauer was awarded the Robert R. Wilson Prize for Achievement in the Physics of Particle Accelerators.

Littauer became a professor emeritus of Physics, His wife Alexandra had died four years earlier.

Selected publications Accelerators: Machines of Nuclear Physics (Anchor Books, 1960) [co-author with Robert R. Wilson] Pulse Electronics (McGraw-Hill, 1965) The Air War in Indochina (Beacon Press, 1972) [co-editor with Norman Uphoff]