Obituary of Alan Charles Kolb

Alan Kolb died Wednesday, August 9, 2006 at his home in Rancho Santa Fe at the age of 77 from liver cancer, which was diagnosed in February 2005. He was a leader in creating the field of Pulsed Power, a new science and technology concerned with very high power electrical pulses of the order of terawatts.

Alan was born in Hoboken, NJ, on December 14, 1928 and grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio. He received his undergraduate education at Georgia Tech, followed by a Masters degree and a PhD at University of Michigan.

His professional career began in 1955 as a staff scientist with the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC, and in 1959 he became superintendent of the newly created NRL Plasma Physics Division.

Alan’s research became internationally visible for his pioneering work on Theta-pinches and the first successful experiments on creating a Magnetic Field Reversed Configuration in a plasma. In 1964 he was selected by the Washington Academy of Sciences as Outstanding Physicist. The F.R.C. experiments were the basis for substantial controlled Fusion programs that are still pursued in Japan and the USA.

He was the leader in the development of a new technology called Pulsed Power which means electrical pulses of extremely short duration and very high power of the order of terawatts. The original motivation was investigating high altitude nuclear weapons effects by simulating X-ray and electromagnetic pulses in the laboratory. This technology which attained a new range of electrical parameters led to many applications involving intense particle beams, high power lasers, materials development and thermonuclear fusion. In 1993, he received the Peter Haas award for his pioneering work on Pulse Power development and applications. Research programs continue in many Universities and Laboratories in the USA, Russia, and most industrial countries in Europe and Asia.

This technology resulted in a major change in his career. He was interested in developing industry to exploit the new technology. He was a founder of Maxwell Laboratories, Inc., and joined the company as CEO and President in 1970. In that capacity he continued to guide major programs conducted for the US government in the fields of nuclear weapons effects simulation and pulsed power, and later in computational physics, underground nuclear test programs and electromagnetic/electrothermal gun development. When he stepped down as Chairman and CEO in 1996, Maxwell was a diversified technology company with more than 50 percent commercial business, while remaining strong in its core technologies for defense applications. Throughout his career, Dr. Kolb was a visionary with an in-depth understanding of technology and the ability to envision the defense and commercial possibilities offered by complex technologies.

He was a major contributor to Applied Physics of the 20th Century. He was one of the originators of the biannual International Conferences on Beams and Pulsed Power which started in 1974 and continues. He originated and sustained the Maxwell Prize in Plasma Physics of the American Physical Society in honor of James Clerk Maxwell. He was instrumental in starting the pulsed power-based plasma physics programs at the University of Maryland and Cornell University in the 1960’s.

Beginning in 1965, Dr. Kolb made many trips to the Soviet Union and supported collaboration with Russian pulsed power and fusion studies in laboratories at Novosibirsk, Dubna and the Kurchatov and Lebedev Institutes in Moscow. He made many personal friendships with luminaries of Russian Science such as G. Budker, R. Sagdeev, L. Artsimovitch, and B. Kadomtsev. He was a significant figure in the development of a civilized relationship with the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Dr. Kolb retired in 1996. In recent years, he continued his passion for technology by applying electrothermal gun technology under an exclusive license from Maxwell. He was Chairman and CEO of E-Blast, LLC which he founded in 1999 to develop and market commercial systems involving electrically controlled combustion of energetic propellants for hard rock mining and tunnel excavation.

Alan had a personal life as well as a professional one. He enjoyed his koi fish collection and competing in shows or finding new additions in Japan for his pond. He skied the globe from Utah, Colorado, Argentina, Chile, Austria, Switzerland and any other place he could find good snow.

He is survived by his family, which consists of his wife, two daughters, a son and eight grandchildren. He will also be remembered by friends and colleagues from all over the world as a creative scientist and a person of great energy and good humor.