Peter Kalmus (physicist)

Peter Ignaz Paul Kalmus OBE HonFInstP (born 25 January 1933), is a British particle physicist, and emeritus professor of physics at Queen Mary, University of London.

He received his BSc (1954) and PhD (1957) at University College London[1] where he remained for a further three years as a Research Associate.

They built a large universal detector, aimed at investigating phenomena at the world's highest energy collisions, which were obtained from 1981 onwards, when the CERN Super Proton Synchrotron was converted into a proton-antiproton collider, as suggested by Rubbia, using the stochastic beam cooling technique devised by Simon van der Meer.

The UK groups had joint responsibility for designing, constructing and operating a large hadron calorimeter and also a trigger processor.

For this work Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer of CERN received the 1984 Nobel Prize for Physics.

[2] 1957 to 1960 - Kalmus conducted research at UCL mainly on the development of new instruments, helping to build a small particle accelerator, a 29 MeV electron microtron, its beam extraction system, and its external focusing using quadrupole magnets (probably the first use of these in the UK), and later devising an accurate method of measuring relativistic electron beam energies using Cerenkov radiation, then a novel technique.

1960 to 1964 – Kalmus worked for Argonne National Laboratory, USA, initially in the Particle Accelerator Division, directed by Albert Crewe.

The Queen Mary and Rutherford Laboratory collaboration carried out a series of experiments at the new Nimrod accelerator at Rutherford Laboratory, mostly in strong interaction physics: nucleon isobar production in proton-proton collisions and elastic proton-proton scattering at wide angles, this time using spark chambers with sonic readout.

Kalmus designed a new low momentum beamline, this time for kaons, for a series of experiments with a polarised deuteron target.

The UK groups involved had joint responsibility for designing, building and operating a large hadron calorimeter and also a trigger processor as part of the UA1 collaboration.

The calorimeter, which measured the energies of strongly-interacting particles emerging from collisions, consisted of 7,000 sheets of plastic scintillator with a total mass of 30 tonnes placed in slots in the return yoke of a large electromagnet.

This necessitated the design of a trigger processor, a purpose-built electronic device which had to make decisions within 2 microseconds on which 1 in 1000 collisions was likely to be worth recording on magnetic tape for subsequent analysis, and which 999 could be discarded irretrievably.

This work resulted in Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer of CERN receiving the 1984 Nobel Prize for Physics.

It yielded results in quark and lepton physics, tests of quantum chromodynamics, properties of W and Z particles and other topics, which have been published in over 60 papers and presented at numerous conferences.

The H1 collaboration had embarked on building a huge detector for the world's first proton-electron collider, HERA, which was being constructed at the DESY laboratory in Hamburg.

The Queen Mary group was responsible for designing and constructing a time-of-flight hodoscope for H1, a piece of apparatus that proved crucial to the operation of the experiment as it reduced the unwanted background by a factor of a hundred.

He started giving outreach lectures in the late 1950s, initially on nuclear power (then a novel source of electricity) to Women's Institutes.

Following an influential report by the Royal Society and particularly after the new UK Research Councils came into existence in 1994, such outreach activities became not only respectable but almost mandatory.

During the 1998–99 academic year he gave the Institute of Physics Schools Lecture 43 times in various venues in England, Scotland, Wales and the Channel Islands to a total audience of about 9,800 people, mostly in the 15 - 19 age group.

Different lectures on aspects of particle physics were given on behalf of the Royal Institution on about 10 occasions at Futuroscope in Poitiers, France, to more than 3,800 UK sixth formers who were there on study-visits.

Discovery of the W particle. The proton-antiproton collision creates a W particle which then decays into a high-energy electron, emitted at a wide angle from the beam (indicated by the arrow at the bottom-right) and an invisible neutrino whose presence is deduced by the missing energy of the electron.
Discovery of the Z particle. The central detector of UA1 reveals the tell-tale signature of the long-awaited Z particle as it decays into an electron-positron pair (arrowed).