Hywel White
Hywel White passed away peacefully at his home in Santa Fe on 20 June 2018 at age 87. He was born on 4 June 1931 in Cardiff, Wales. A strong believer in education and learning, he graduated from Cardiff University and then received his PhD in physics from the University of Birmingham. After moving to the US in 1959, he taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Cornell University before centering his efforts on research at Brookhaven National Laboratory and then finally at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
As a postdoc and assistant professor at Penn, Hywel studied weak interactions of kaons at the Princeton–Penn and Brookhaven Cosmotron accelerators. Hywel started his Cornell career by collaborating with Jay Orear in a series of timely hadron scattering and production experiments at the Brookhaven National Laboratory Alternating Gradient Accelerator (AGS). The importance of deep inelastic electron scattering and the relatively large duty factor of the Cornell Electron Synchrotron attracted him to electroproduction experiments at Cornell. He was particularly adroit at adapting technologies (e.g. wide gap and large magnetostrictive spark chambers), which were unusual at electron accelerators, to these experiments. Hywel had an extraordinary talent for attracting, motivating, and mentoring graduate students. In his final effort at Cornell, he led a group of 14 professors, postdocs, and graduate students (the largest experimental group assembled at Cornell up to that time!) in an experiment to study exclusive hadroproduction in deep inelastic scattering. The experiment utilized a dozen proportional wire chambers located inside of a large aperture magnet. The key to this experiment was managing to control the “sheet of flame,” the vast number of electrons and positrons that fan out in a thin sheet when an electron beam strikes a target located in a magnetic field. Hwyel also coauthored seven articles on the sociology of the field of weak interactions.
Hywel moved in mid 1978 from Cornell to Brookhaven, where he headed the ISABELLE Experimental Facilities Division. Among the division’s missions was to provide physics input for the design and construction of the experimental areas. These facilities were built at four of ISABELLE’s collision regions before the project was cancelled in 1983. All of these, the tunnel and the helium refrigeration system for the ring were used successfully for the RHIC machine and its experimental program.
At the same time, work started on the neutrino electron elastic scattering experiment E-734 at the AGS. The principal groups involved were from Brookhaven (led by Hywel), University of Pennsylvania (led by Al Mann), and Brown University (led by Bob Lanou). The detector was a large tracking calorimeter with alternating layers of liquid scintillator read out by phototubes and proportional tube arrays. E-734 had a long and successful run during the 1980s, after the cancellation of ISABELLE and before the construction of RHIC.
Hywel moved to Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1986 as a nuclear physics group leader and formed an accelerator neutrino group. He was an outstanding group leader who knew instinctively how to deal with bureaucracy at the laboratory and knew which paperwork was important and which paperwork could be ignored. Hywel was also an outstanding physicist, and nuclear physics research prospered during his leadership.
In 1990 the Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector (LSND) experiment was approved at the LAMPF facility, and he was instrumental in the construction of LSND, serving very effectively as project manager. Thanks to Hywel’s efforts, LSND was constructed in three years for the modest cost of $5 million and ran for six years, from 1993–98. Following the evidence for neutrino oscillations from LSND, Hywel was named a LANL Fellow and played a major role in getting the MiniBooNE neutrino experiment approved at Fermilab in 1998 and taking data in 2002.
Hywel played a heroic role in the mid 1990s, when LAMPF lost funding from DOE Nuclear Physics. As group leader, he oversaw the downsizing of the nuclear physics group and worked feverishly and successfully to find places at the laboratory for many of the staff members.
After Hywel retired in 1998, he maintained a strong interest in neutrino physics and continued coming to work several days a week. As a lifelong “kinematics buff,” Hywel enjoyed the close relationship between electron and neutrino scattering kinematics. He also served as an advisor to Peter Rosen, when Peter was head of the DOE Nuclear and High Energy Physics programs. In addition, Hywel became an avid tennis player, learned to fly single-engine airplanes, and walked three miles a day for exercise.
In Birmingham, Hywel met his wife, Frances. After more than 50 years of their marriage, she passed away in 2010. He is survived by his sister Anne, his two sons, Richard and Christopher, four grandchildren, and a number of other family members in both the US and UK.
In summary, Hywel was an inspirational and born leader. As a leader of a project, he would often make a “default” decision that could be changed later but which allowed the program to move forward. He was also an advocate of moderation, as the optimal efficiency was often in the middle and not at the extremes (i.e. people should work hard but not too hard). He was an excellent mentor for younger people and helped many students and postdocs with their careers. Overall, Hywel was a wonderful human being, friend, and colleague.
