Obituary of George Randolph Kalbfleisch

George Randolph Kalbfleisch, 75, discoverer of the η’ meson and founder of the high-energy group at the University of Oklahoma, died September 12, 2006, in Norman, Oklahoma, of complications resulting from Lewy-Body disease.

George Kalbfleisch was born March 14, 1931 in Long Beach, California, to Friedrich Carl and Hildegard Kalbfleisch. He graduated from Phineas Banning High School, Wilmington, California, in 1948, graduating on time in spite of losing his junior year to rheumatic fever. He received his BS degree in chemistry from Loyola University, Los Angeles, in 1952. On October 23, 1954, he married Ruth Ann Adams in San Pedro, California. After working a few years as a chemist for Hunt Foods and Hales Laboratories, George realized that his real love was physics, and he became first a technician and then a graduate research assistant at Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in 1957. He received his Ph.D. in experimental High Energy Physics in 1961 from the University of California at Berkeley under the direction of M. Lynn Stevenson, studying $K$-meson production in $p\bar p$ collisions. By that point he already had 7 publications, mostly on hyperon production and decay. George continued in Luis Alvarez’ group at Berkeley as a postdoctoral associate until 1964. His work there culminated in his discovery of the ninth member of the pseudoscalar nonet of mesons, the $\eta'$. He then moved to Brookhaven National Laboratory, where he received tenure in 1968, where his publications show him still unraveling hyperonic and mesonic properties. Less conventionally, he also published a search for tachyons, and compared muon and neutrino velocities in a test of special relativity. He stayed at Brookhaven until 1976, then moving to Fermilab for three years, where he worked on the development of superconducting quadrupole magnets for the Tevatron.

George Kalbfleisch was recruited to the University of Oklahoma (OU) in 1979 with the intention of establishing a High Energy Physics group. This he succeeded in doing, by hiring several new faculty in both experiment and theory over the next decade, and by securing stable funding from the Department of Energy which continues to this day. At OU he developed the silicon microstrip detectors used by the D0 collaboration at the Tevatron. He was elected as a Fellow in the American Physical Society in 1982. In 1990 he established a sister High Energy Physics group at Langston University, a traditionally Black college in Oklahoma. He was a consultant for the SSC until that project was canceled in 1993. In 1999, Dr. Kalbfleisch retired from teaching, although he continued conducting research until a few weeks before his death. In fact, George was working hard in his office and discussing physics with his colleagues the day before his final illness.

In 2001, he was the first physicist inducted into the inaugural Alumni Wall of Fame at his alma mater, Loyola Marymount University, in honor of his lifetime achievements. His research at OU included the study of charm and beauty quantum states at Fermilab as part of the D0 collaboration and of neutrino properties in-house at OU. In 1995 he proposed that the old CDF and D0 detectors at the Tevatron be cut up and run through an induction detector to search for any magnetic monopoles that might have been produced at Fermilab. He was inspired in this by his mentor Luis Alvarez, who had used a similar detector to look for monopoles in moon rocks. He and his group at OU finished the search for low mass accelerator-produced magnetic monopoles (Fermilab experiment E-882) in 2004. In the last few years, he worked on an experiment to detect the electric dipole moment (EDM) of the electron at OU, principally in collaboration with Neil Shafer-Ray.

George Kalbfleisch published more than one hundred and ninety articles in elementary particle physics, and was an inspiration for all those around him. He had two graduate students work with him at OU on in-house experiments: Moustafa Bahran, who worked on the experimental refutation of the short-lived 17 keV neutrino, is now the science advisor to the President of Yemen; and Wei Luo, whose thesis was determining mass limits on magnetic monopoles from the D0/CDF detectors, now works on medical research at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia.

George was a wonderful family man. He is survived by his wife of 52 years, Ruth Ann and his four children Karen, George, Jr., Julie, and Carl, and five grandchildren. He enjoyed tracing the genealogy of his family, and was able, after the fall of the Berlin wall, to track down a number of his German relations. He was a tireless supporter of the University of Oklahoma, and of its football team. He will be sorely missed.