Gluckstern Garden

Gluckstern Garden. . , This garden celebrates the life of Professor Robert L. Gluckstern (1924-2008), renowned educator and scientist. Prior to coming to the University of Maryland at College Park in 1975, he held faculty and administrative positions at Yale University and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He served as Chancellor (now called President) at Maryland until 1982, returning to the Physics Department to teach and pursue research. he was a recipient of the President's Medal in 1996 and retired in 1997, continuing his research and service to the department., Bob was a first-rate scientists with contributions in a great many areas of physics. His last contribution was in theoretical physics as applied to the acceleration of charged particles. The beautiful figure presented here comes from numerical calculations guided by his deep theoretical understanding. it displays a phase-space plot for motion of beam particles in one of the two transverse dimensions of the beam (in this figure, position is vertical and velocity is horizontal). Ideally the beam should consist of a small intense core (shown in blue) with well defining edges so that the beam can be surrounded by a small diameter vacuum pipe. Such beams tend to develop halos, shown in red and yellow, coming from instabilities arising from the strong coulomb repulsion between the various beam particles, and particles in the halo can strike the vacuum pipe, making an accelerator so extremely radioactive that it becomes unserviceable. Bob studied these instabilities and developed methods to eliminated them, thereby making it possible to construct and operate modern high-current particle accelerators.