Lawrence, Ernest Orlando

Lawrence, Ernest Orlando (1901-1958), American physicist and Nobel laureate, best known for his invention and development of the cyclotron, a device to accelerate nuclear particles and used in the discovery of the transuranium elements. Born in Canton, South Dakota, Lawrence was educated at the universities of South Dakota, Minnesota, and Chicago and at Yale University. He was appointed assistant professor of physics at the University of California in 1927 and full professor in 1930. The following year he founded the university radiation laboratory in Berkeley, becoming its director in 1936. He was awarded the 1939 Nobel Prize in physics and the Enrico Fermi Award in 1957.

born Aug. 8, 1901, Canton, S.D., U.S.

died Aug. 27, 1958, Palo Alto, Calif.

American physicist, winner of the 1939 Nobel Prize for Physics for his invention of the cyclotron, the first particle accelerator to achieve high energies.

Lawrence earned his Ph.D. at Yale University in 1925. An assistant professor of physics at Yale (1927–28), he went to the University of California, Berkeley, as an associate professor and became full professor there in 1930.

Lawrence first conceived the idea for the cyclotron in 1929. One of his students, M. Stanley Livingston, undertook the project and succeeded in building a device that accelerated hydrogen ions (protons) to an energy of 13,000 electron volts (eV). Lawrence then set out to build a second cyclotron; when completed, it accelerated protons to 1,200,000 eV, enough energy to cause nuclear disintegration. To continue the program, Lawrencebuilt the Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley in 1936 and was made its director.

One of Lawrence's cyclotrons produced technetium, the first element that does not occur in nature to be made artificially. His basic design was utilized in developing other particle accelerators, which have been largely responsible for the great advances made in the field of particle physics. With the cyclotron, he produced radioactive phosphorus and other isotopes for medical use, including radioactive iodine for the first therapeutic treatment of hyperthyroidism. In addition, he instituted the use of neutron beams in treating cancer.

During World War II he worked with the Manhattan Project as a program chief in charge of the development of the electromagnetic process of separating uranium-235 for the atomic bomb. In 1957 he received the Fermi Award from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. Besides his work in nuclear physics, Lawrence invented and patented a colour-television picture tube. In his honour were named Lawrence Berkeley Laboratoryat Berkeley; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory at Livermore, Calif.; and element 103, lawrencium.

Additional reading

Herbert Childs, An American Genius (1968), is a biography for the general reader based on more than 800 interviews with Lawrence's family, friends, and colleagues. Nuel Pharr Davis, Lawrence and Oppenheimer (1968), traces the changing relationship between Lawrence and fellow physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. J.L. Heilbron and Robert W. Seidel, Lawrence and His Laboratory: A History of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, vol. 1 (1989), is a major study.