Nicholas Christofilos

Nicholas Constantine Christofilos (Νικόλαος Χριστοφίλου) (16.12.1916 – 24.9.1972) Greek-American physicist. Similar as Nikola Tesla he was an amazing personality. He was born in Boston, USA and raised in Greece. Christofilos was working for an Athens elevator company when he became interested in high-energy particle physics. He worked on large scale projects mainly for military purposes. His strong focusing principle that was found by others later independently reduces the dimension and costs of accelerators necessary to achieve beams of a given energy. With this principle more energetic beams allowed to increase our knowledge of the fundamental constituents of the world. Other ideas of Christofilos that have been realized are antennas of almost continental dimensions using millions of Watts to produce extreme low frequency waves for submarine communication, or the generation of Van Allen Belt like artificial radiation belts formed by explosions of hydrogen nuclear bombs in the upper atmosphere, that also can produce electromagnetic short intense pulses able to destroy all electronic devices over a very large area. The radiation could destroy Soviet satellites in orbit and disturb the majority of military communication carried over HF and VHF radio frequency bands. Greek Newspaper that claims that the autodidact nuclear scientist Christofilos found a method to transform matter into energy. The Journal Life calls Christofilos „The Crazy Greek“ for his ideas. (William Trombley, “Triumph is Space for a 'Crazy Greek'”, Life (March 30, 1959), pp. 31-34.) The first inventor of this method was the Greek Nicholas Christofilos who had had this idea patented in March 1950. However, it was not accepted and published until February 28, 1956. He worked for Westinghouse. The avocation of the Greek elevator engineer was the study of particle motion in magnetic fields. Pursuing those studies he discovered "strong focusing," now a widely-used method of controlling beams of energetic ions in accelerators. He communicated this to scientists in the US, but received little attention until the principle was independently re-discovered. 1952 it was reinvented independently by Ernest Courant, Livingston, and Hartland Snyder. Conventional wisdom says that a magnetic lens to focus particles both horizontally and vertically cannot be constructed— in contrast to optical lenses, which can. But the principle of strong focusing showed that, while a magnetic lens indeed focuses in one plane and defocuses in the orthogonal plane, if two such lenses are separated along the beam path, then their net effect is to focus in both planes simultaneously. This breakthrough made it possible to squeeze beams in circular (and also linear!) accelerators to much tighter dimensions, thus reducing magnetic field volumes and therefore costs. People at Berkeley found Christofilos paper in their files. They had examined it superficially and dismissed it as one of the many crackpot letters that laboratories get. Courant and Livingston published a letter in the Physical Review acknowledging Christofilos’s priority. An agreement was reached with the AEC whereby Christofilos received a substantial payment, and he was hired to join the Brookhaven staff. Nicholas Christofilos, one of the most original thinkers in physics of his generation, was pursuing a magnetic fusion concept, Astron. According to T. K. Fowler the Astron idea is: confining a plasma within the magnetic field produced by an intense circulating electron beam (the E-layer). The E-layer electrons were used to heat the plasma to reach thermonuclear ignition temperatures. The Astron would be then a device that produces electric power from thermonuclear reactions. Astron required the invention of a new kind of electron accelerator, the induction linear accelerator (or induction linac), to produce an intense circulating electron beam to magnetically confine and heat a plasma. Induction linacs are now the heart of the n