Obituary of Thomas L. Jenkins

Thomas L. Jenkins was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1927. He was the son of UC Berkeley physicist, Francis A. Jenkins, co-author of the famous optics text. Tom completed his BA at Pomona College and in 1956 his Ph.D. at Cornell. His doctoral research was the study of pion photoproduction at the Cornell synchrotron. He spent the next five years at the Lawrence Livermore Lab working on shock hydrodynamics aspects of nuclear weapons design.

In 1960 Tom joined Fred Reines at Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland. In an experiment at the Savannah River nuclear reactor, the two experimenters measured the inverse beta decay interaction of neutrinos with the neutron in the deuteron. Subsequently, Jenkins, Reines and their collaborators undertook a series of solar neutrino, proton decay, and double beta decay low background searches in a saltmine near Cleveland. Soon afterward, they shipped their detection equipment to South Africa to be used in the search for neutrino induced muons in a 10,500 foot deep gold mine. They succeeded in making the first observation of natural neutrinos, i.e. not nuclear reactor products.

In the 1970’s, Jenkins returned to accelerator based particle production experiments with a series of experiments at the Argonne Laboratory Zero Gradient Synchrotron. With his colleague, Bill Frisken, and two post-docs, Tom designed, built, and installed a large array of spark chambers at the ZGS. Their measurements elucidated the role of baryon exchange in pion-nucleon charge exchange reactions.

In what was essentially the third chapter of his research at Case, Jenkins joined his colleague, the late Glenn Frye, in the development of a series of drift chamber detectors to be used in balloon and satellite-borne experiments.

A supporter for many years of the Sierra Club, Tom was a champion of the environment. In his later years, he donated much of his time as a volunteer in the nearby national park system, bicycling along the trails to assist visitors and to support conservation programs.

In his 37 years at CWRU, Tom Jenkins was a master of particle detector technology, moving easily from nuclear physics to neutrinos to astrophysics to accelerator physics to solar flares. He provided exciting research opportunities for his grad students and post-docs.