Raphael Max Littauer (November 28, 1925 – October 19, 2009) was an American physicist who was a longtime Professor of Physics and Nuclear Studies at Cornell University. He was involved in the development of several particle accelerators there, in particular the 10 GeV electron synchrotron at the Wilson Synchrotron Lab in the late 1960s, where he devised a distributed, multiplexed control system for it, and the Cornell Electron Storage Ring (CESR) in the late 1970s and early 1980s, where his scheme to create pretzel-shaped orbits to increase the number of particle bunches in circulation contributed significantly to CESR having the highest luminosity of any accelerator of its era. Littauer was also known for his teaching, including the design, implementation, and installation of one of the earliest and most successful classroom response systems. An active opponent of the Vietnam War, he led a group at Cornell that published a well-regarded study on the nature and effects of the U.S. air attacks in Southeast Asia. In 1991 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society and in 1995 he received the Robert R. Wilson Prize for Achievement in the Physics of Particle Accelerators.
Early life and education Littauer was born in Leipzig, Germany, on November 28, 1925. In March 1939 he emigrated to the United Kingdom, six months before the outbreak of World War II. According to what his daughter later related, he was part of the Kindertransport and was taken in by a family in England. He attended the University of Cambridge beginning in 1943. He first received an M.A. degree, that being awarded in 1946. He then earned a Ph.D. from Christ's College at Cambridge in 1950, the title of his dissertation being Levels in Light Elements. During this time he worked as an assistant in the famed Cavendish Laboratory.
Marriage and family Littauer married Salome Alexandra Kroch in 1950. Also born in Leipzig, she and her two sisters had endured a hazardous journey through Europe in order to survive the Holocaust. Littauer left England for the United States in 1950, becoming a research associate at Cornell University. Together he and his wife had two children. The couple lived in Ithaca, New York. Alexandra Littauer taught French in the younger grades of the Ithaca City School District and later became an instructor in French at Cornell. Raphael Littauer became a United States citizen in 1956.
Career as physicist
Accelerators and positions
Littauer's arrival at Cornell in 1950 was in order to do work on an electron accelerator at Cornell's Laboratory for Nuclear Studies, which had been founded after World War II by scientists returning to academic life following their efforts at Los Alamos. The director of that laboratory, Robert R. Wilson, was instrumental in bringing Littauer there. At the time Cornell had a 300 MeV electron synchrotron, which was followed in 1952 by a new 1.3 GeV synchrotron. In 1954, Littauer departed Cornell to work on a synchrotron at the General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, New York. But in 1955, Littauer returned to Cornell for good, being appointed a member of the faculty as a Research Associate Professor of Physics. Once again, Wilson played a role in his return. In 1963, Littauer was named a research professor. Then in 1965, he became a full professor, being named a professor of Physics and Nuclear Studies. Littauer was awarded two postdoctoral fellowships from the National Science Foundation. The second of these, in 1968, involved work at the Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati in Italy. There he spent a semester working on the laboratory's new 1.5 GeV electron-positron colliding beam accelerator. Later in 1968, Cornell's Wilson Synchrotron Laboratory saw the dedication of its new 10 GeV electron synchrotron, the largest and most powerful such one in the world, with Littauer highlighted as one of the people who helped develop it. The ring was built underneath Schoellkopf Field and other athletic facilities on campus. Among Littauer's responsibilities were monitoring and adjusting the steering coils located around the synchrotron's ring . As part of his work, Littauer created a time-sharing, distributed, multiplex control system for the synchrotron that helped reduce both the initial and ongoing costs of the system.
The Cornell Electron Storage Ring (CESR) came into operation at the end of 1970s but initially featured disappointing luminosity, so over the next several years several improvements to it were made. One of them, put into place in 1983, was Littauer's development of a scheme for so-called "pretzel orbits" (a name he came up with). This involved having multiple bunches of particles in a storage ring, but introducing electrostatic separators at key places in the ring such that two counter-circulating beams are displaced in eccentric and opposite directions, thereby limiting the number of collisions in a rotation and increasing the number of bunches that can be in circulation. With this among other improvements, throughout the 1990s, CESR had the highest luminosity of any colliding-beam system in the world and became valuable as a synchrotron light source The pretzel orbits scheme was subsequently embraced and successfully incorporated into the Tevatron particle accelerator at Fermilab and the Large Electron–Positron Collider at CERN. Overall, the physicist Maury Tigner has described Littauer as someone who was "very much interested in accelerators and was ... a pioneering controls designer and builder." In 1974, Littauer was elected chair of Cornell's department of physics, a department which held 47 faculty members at the time. He remained in that position for three years.
Research
In addition to his work on accelerator construction and operation, Littauer was the author or co-author of a number of articles in physics journals. In 1958, he was one of several groups that published results regarding nucleon resonances, finding and establishing the properties of the state latter known as N(1520).
Teaching
Littauer had a longtime interest in how the teaching of physics, and teaching in general, could be improved. This included giving out lecture notes that emphasized scientific understanding coming out of mathematical formulae and experiments that could be performed in class.
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