Obituary of Richard Plano (1929-2012)

Richard Plano, a Professor of Physics who retired from Rutgers University in 1999, died on 8 January 2012 after a prolonged illness. He was 82 years old. Dick’s pioneering work in bubble chambers revealed the properties of several particles, including the K meson, providing essential input for the development of the Unitary Symmetry model, which led to our understanding of the quark substructure of hadrons. His passion for physics was mirrored in all facets of his life, from teaching to spending time with his family. He had a wonderful sense of humor and a generous spirit.

In his early career, Dick made many measurements of elementary particle properties, including the first measurement of the parity of the neutral pion. Subsequently he worked on a long series of experiments, including hadron interactions, neutrino interactions, and electron-positron interactions. He was also a pioneer in the application of powerful computer systems for data acquisition and analysis.

Richard James Plano was born on April 15, 1929 in Merrill, Wisconsin. He won a competitive all-tuition Pepsi-Cola Scholarship, which made it possible for him to attend the University of Chicago, where he received an AB Degree in 1949, a BS degree in 1951, and his Ph.D. in 1956. With Roger Hildebrand as his thesis advisor, Dick helped develop the first liquid hydrogen bubble chamber, which he then used for his thesis research, studying low energy scattering of negative pions on protons.

At the invitation of Jack Steinberger, Dick joined the faculty of Columbia University in January 1956 as an instructor and was promoted to assistant professor in 1958. With his collaborators, Dick’s early research concentrated on studies of strangeness, via bubble chamber experiments at Nevis Laboratory and Brookhaven National Laboratory using 12-inch and 30-inch chambers, both propane and hydrogen. Detailed studies of the properties of the then mysterious neutral K meson were made, the spins of the Lambda and Sigma baryons were measured, parity violation in the decay of the Lambda was demonstrated, and numerous other results were obtained.

In later experiments at Nevis, Dick and collaborators made the first measurement of the parity of the neutral pion, establishing that it is a pseudoscalar particle. Dick took the lead in measuring the rho value in muon decays and also measured the asymmetry spectrum, thereby confirming the prediction of the V-A theory of weak interactions.

In 1960 he joined the Physics Department at Rutgers University, where he was to spend the next 39 years until his retirement. He quickly founded a strong program in experimental high-energy physics, starting with an advanced facility to analyze bubble chamber photographs. In 1963 he was promoted to full professor. His research was supported by the National Science Foundation, and initially focused on the interactions of 25 GeV/c protons in the 30-inch hydrogen bubble chamber.

The NSF support included funding for the Precision Encoding and Pattern Recognition (PEPR) system, a device designed to scan and measure bubble chamber photographs semi-automatically under computer control. The PEPR device was controlled by a time-sharing computer system, at that time the most powerful at Rutgers University. This computer system was also used to analyze the resulting data, and was made available to the entire Physics faculty starting in 1965. This pioneering effort gave the department impressive computing power at an early stage in the development of computers. Later, Dick joined the International Hybrid Spectrometer Consortium, which did a series of hadron experiments at Fermilab in which electronic detectors and bubble chambers worked together to exploit the excellent time resolution of the former and the high spatial resolution of the latter. PEPR was used extensively.

In the 1980s Dick worked on a series of neutrino experiments using the Fermilab 15-foot neon bubble chamber. Starting in 1985 his major interest turned to electron accelerators and he joined the SLD experiment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, which studied electron-positron interactions at the mass of the neutral Z boson. Dick especially contributed to the development of the Cerenkov Ring Imaging Detector (CRID) which was used for particle identification in SLD.

Dick enjoyed teaching at all levels, from large-enrollment introductory courses to mentoring graduate students; thirteen received the Ph.D. degree under his guidance. When teaching introductory physics classes, he might enter the classroom on roller skates while juggling, all the better to teach frames of reference, or bring in his beloved clarinet to illustrate the behavior of sound waves. After his retirement, he was a popular teacher at the Rutgers University Academy for Lifelong Learning (RU-ALL), providing insights into the formation of the universe, climate change and other topics in a way that made it accessible to even the least technical members of the audience. He was an accomplished musician from an early age, playing the piano, the clarinet and even the bassoon in local orchestras, joined by his son and daughter-in-law whenever possible.

He wrote numerous computer programs in support of instruction, including record-keeping and teaching evaluation programs. His exam-creation and exam-grading programs are being used to this day in the Physics Department at Rutgers. There are several awards in the Department named after Dick: the Richard Plano Summer Research Internships, the Richard Plano PhD Dissertation Prize, and the Richard Plano Outstanding Teaching Assistant Awards. Dick’s thirst for knowledge never ebbed. Even as he grew increasingly ill, he relished meeting new people, and C-SPAN was almost always on.

Dick is survived by his wife Louise, children Linda and Robert, daughter-in-law Suzanne and two grandchildren, Keira and Nicholas. He is greatly missed by them as well as by all his colleagues at Rutgers and the world of high energy physics at large.