Date: Thursday January  23, 2020 at 4pm
Location: 223 Herman Brown Hall, Rice University

The STAR experiment at Brookhaven National Lab is featured in one of the fifteen locations of Apple’s tribute to “30 years of Mac”. It starts 46 seconds into the video clip at the link below.

http://www.apple.com/30-years/1-24-14-film/

Look for two of our BNL colleagues in front of the detector (Paul and Bill) and for one of the T.W. Bonner Lab’s contributions to the experiment, the VPD (vertex position detector).

(The other contribution, the TOF,  is a bit more difficult to find behind all the tubes and cables)

T.W. Bonner Nuclear Laboratories Dedication

Today, you can find this dedication stone in the hall way of the T.W. Bonner Lab in the Herman Brown Hall on the 2nd floor. A few decades back, however, this stone marked a dedicated building home to the  T.W. Bonner  Nuclear Laboratories and its Van de Graaff generator. A few pictures from the Rice Archives can be found at this great blog entry in the Rice History Corner.

Tom Wilkerson Bonner had a very close relationship with Rice throughout most of his life, with occasional visits to Caltech, Cambridge, MIT, and the Los Alamos Laboratory. His death on December 6, 1961 was sudden and completely unexpected.

Born in Greenville TX, Tom attended both high school and Southern Methodist University in Dallas. With an initial interest in geophysics, he committed to physics and joined the (at that time) Rice Institute in the early 1930s to work with Prof. H.A. Wilson. After receiving his Master’s degree, and following Chadwick’s discovery of the neutron, Tom decided to study neutrons. With a Rice Ph.D. next, a National Research Fellowsip enabled him to visit Caltech and work with Charles Christian Lauritsen (who in 1967 would receive the T.W. Bonner Prize) and a graduate student building high-pressure cloud chambers.

Shortly before his return to Rice as a physics instructor in 1936, Tom Bonner visited the Europe to meet people like Cockcroft, Rutherford, and Oliphant. While on another visit to Cambridge and later on Madison, a Van de Graaff accelerator was build at Rice. After the war years, during which he worked at MIT Radiation Lab, Tom Bonner returned to Rice and was appointed chairman of the physics department, following Wilson who retired. In what would be his last years, Tom W. Bonner was increasingly recognized for his many contributions and dedication. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1959.

Sources: A very nice biographical memoir of Tom W. Bonner by W.V. Houston can be found at the National Academies Press through the following link. His obituary in Physics Today of February 1962 can be found at the following link

Thanks to the great help from Rice IT, the new website can be reached at the following URLs:

http://bonnerlab.rice.edu    or http://www.bonnerlab.rice.edu

User web pages are still available through http://bonner.rice.edu/~<user>

-fg.

After a few years of absence, I am happy to welcome back a central portal to the exciting research that takes place in the T.W. Bonner Nuclear Laboratory. I will use this site to not only showcase the research that the Bonner Lab faculty are involved in, but also communicate the weekly Nuclear & Particle Physics seminars and any other presentations/colloquia either at our department, or anywhere else (hey, we live in a very connected world!).

-FG.