Boyce McDaniel

Boyce D. McDaniel (June 11, 1917 - May 8, 2002) was an American nuclear physicist, a professor of physics at Cornell University, a former director of the Cornell Laboratory of Nuclear Studies (LNS) and a Manhattan Project scientist.

McDaniel was born in Brevard, North Carolina. He graduated from Chesterville High School, Chesterville, Ohio, in 1933. He earned his bachelor's degree from Ohio Wesleyan University in 1938 and his master's degree from the Case School of Applied Science (now Case Western Reserve University) in 1940.

McDaniel had finished his doctoral thesis at Cornell in 1943, researching the absorption rates of neutrons in indium. While the thesis itself was not considered classified information by the U.S. government, McDaniel and his Cornell mentor, Robert Bacher, understood its implications for weapons research. They marked each page "secret" and locked two copies away in the university's library. McDaniel got his professional start in World War II when he was hired by Bacher to work at a secret facility in Los Alamos, New Mexico, conducting nuclear physics research on a device nicknamed "the gadget." The device was the atomic bomb, and McDaniel played a critical role on physicist Robert R. Wilson's cyclotron research team, which helped identify the amount of uranium-235 (U-235) needed to create the atomic fission to detonate the world's first nuclear weapon. He gave the first atomic bomb its final check before the Trinity test in New Mexico on July 16, 1945.

In 1946, McDaniel joined the Cornell faculty as an assistant professor and became a full professor in 1955. With Cornell physicist Robert Walker, he invented the pair spectrometer, an important tool used to measure gamma ray energies.

He was a leader in establishing Cornell's Laboratory for Nuclear Studies (LNS) and had a leading role in designing and building the 300 megavolt (MeV) electron synchrotron, one of the first such accelerators in the world. He and Wilson, who was McDaniel's predecessor as director of LNS, built three more electron synchrotrons of successively higher energies, each of which enabled physicists to study phenomena in a new energy range.

McDaniel became director of LNS in 1967 and remained in that position until he retired from the Cornell faculty in 1985. He pioneered the technique of tagged gamma rays and performed important measurements with each of these accelerators, including a long series of work in K-meson and lambda-meson photo production and measurements of the neutron electromagnetic form factors.

In 1972, McDaniel took a year's leave from Cornell to become acting head of the accelerator section at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois. Though the Fermilab accelerator had operated at a near-design energy, component failure was frequent and operation intermittent. McDaniel had the accelerator working by the end of the year.

Back at Cornell in 1974, McDaniel proposed upgrading the existing 10 GeV (gigavolt) synchrotron into an 8 GeV electron-positron storage ring. The storage ring, known as CESR, became the world's leading source of information about the b-quark, one of the fundamental building blocks of matter.

Honors

McDaniel was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a trustee of the Associated Universities, on the governing board of Brookhaven National Laboratory, a member of the Department of Energy High Energy Advisory Panel, a trustee of the Universities Research Association and a governing board member of Fermilab.

External References

* [http://www.news.cornell.edu/Chronicle/02/5.16.02/McDaniel-obit.html Obituary]