Bogdan Castle Maglich (also spelled Maglic or Maglić) (born August 5, 1928 in Sombor, Yugoslavia) is a nuclear physicist and the leading advocate of a purported non-radioactive aneutronic fusion energy source. Maglich's Migma fusion would use colliding ion beams. He is the son of a lawyer and elected member of the Yugoslav Royal Parliament. At the age of 12, he and his mother were imprisoned in a Croatian Nazi concentration camp for Serbs, but they subsequently escaped.
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Maglich received his Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Belgrade in 1951, his Master of Science degree from the University of Liverpool in 1955, and his Ph.D. in high-energy physics and nuclear engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1959. Upon receiving his Ph.D., Maglich joined Dr. Louis Alvarez's research group at Lawrence Berkely Lab. During this time, he participated in the discovery of the omega meson and invented the "sonic spark chamber".[1]
Between 1963 and 1967, he worked at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. While conducting research at CERN, he invented the "missing mass spectrometer".[2]
In 1967, Maglich joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, as well as being visiting faculty at Princeton University. In 1969, he became Professor and Principal Investigator for High Energy Physics at Rutgers University. In 1974, he left academia to pursue his research in the private sector.
Maglich first rose to prominence in his field working on a team at the University of California's Lawrence Radiation Laboratory analyzing liquid hydrogen bubble chamber data from Berkeley's bevatron accelerator. The team, which also included Luis W. Alvarez, Dr. Arthur H Rosenfeld, and M.L. Stevenson, discovered the first solid experimental evidence for the existence of the ω meson resonance.[3] (In 1968, Luis Alvarez was awarded a Nobel Price for this and related work.) Maglich's contribution to this discovery led to him receiving the White House Citation from President John F. Kennedy and being named an honorary citizen in Switzerland by the President of the Swiss Confederation.
Toward the end of the 1960s, Maglich developed the precetron, a self-colliding particle beam accelerator for studying pion-pion collisions.[4] Shortly thereafter, in the early 1970s, the precetron design formed the basis for Maglich's "migmatron" concept of a self-colliding ion beam fusion reactor.[5]
In his attempts to raise funding for his migma research, Maglich has been associated with a string of business ventures. In 1974, he formed Funsion Energy Corp. From 1985 to 1987, he was CEO and Principal Investigator of Aneutronic Energy Labs of United Sciences, Inc. at Princeton, a research firm also known as "AELabs." It was during this time that Maglich worked under a research grant from the United States Air Force to attempt to develop his migmatron concept into a compact power source for spacecraft. From 1988 until 1993, he was CEO of Advanced Physics Corporation.
In 1995, Maglich founded HiEnergy Microdevices, which later became HiEnergy Technologies, Inc., a manufacturer of neutron-based bomb detection equipment. He continued to occupy various positions with that company until being terminated for cause. HiEnergy Technologies declared bankruptcy in 2007.[6] After leaving HiEnergy Technologies, Maglich became president of Centurion Enterprises Corporation.
Maglich has four children: Angelica (born 1989) and Aleksandra Maglich (born 1991), from a prior marriage to UCLA media artist Victoria Vesna; also Marko (born 1960), Ivanka (born 1961).