Rolf Widerøe (11 July 1902 – 11 October 1996), was a Norwegian particle physicist who was the originator of many particle acceleration concepts,[1] including the resonance accelerator, the betatron accelerator.
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Widerøe was born in Oslo in 1902, the son of a mercantile agent.[1][2] His younger brother Viggo became the founder of the Norwegian airline Widerøe.[2] By 16, he was interested in nitrogen atoms and in 1920 graduated from Halling Gymnasium.[2] Realizing that for nuclear advances to occur electrical engineering needed to be improved, thus he decided to study electrical engineering in Oslo, and later physics in Karlsruhe, Germany.[1]
There he conceived the concept of magnetic induction to accelerate electrons, which became the basis of what would be known as betatron.[2] This idea was to use a vortex field surrounding a magnetic field to accelerate electrons in a tube.[1]
In 1924, he returned to Norway, but went back to Germany in 1925. There he studied at the Technical University at Aachen, where he proposed a thesis in 1927 for an experimental betatron accelerator, incorporating the work of Swedish scientist Gustav Ising of 1924,[2][3] which was not successful.[1] This thesis however was studied by Ernest Lawrence in the United States, and used as the basis for his creation of the cyclotron.[2][3]
From his betatron experiment, he developed further ideas of particle acceleration without the necessity of high voltage. The method was resonating particles with a radiofrequency electric field to add energy to each traversal of the field. This experiment was successful and published in 1928,[1] and became the progenitor of all high-energy particle accelerators. Again, Ernest Lawrence would use this method in constructing his cyclotron in 1929.[1]
Widerøe began collaborating with the Nazi German government following their election in Germany,[4] where in 1943 he introduced the concept of colliding particles head-on to increase interaction energy and a storage ring device.[1][5] His Norwegian citizenship was ultimately revoked for working with the Nazi government.[4]
In 1946 he filed a patent in Norway for an accelerator based on synchronous acceleration.[1] He would go on to publish over 180 papers in scientific and engineering journals, and filed over 200 patent applications over his lifetime. In his later life he devoted much time to medicinal technology, focusing on cancer treatment, including developing megavolt radiation therapy technologies.[5] He would collaborate with CERN beginning in 1952,[5] lectured at ETH Zurich in 1953, and collaborated at DESY in 1959 in Hamburg.[5]