Paul David Luckey
Paul David (“Dave”) Luckey died on 1 April 2019. He was an experimental high-energy physicist who specialized in the use of crystals for electromagnetic calorimeters.
Dave was born on 18 May 1928 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He graduated from high school in 1946. From 1946 to 1948 he studied physics at the Carnegie Mellon Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, where he received a BS in 1948. From 1948 to 1952 he studied at the graduate school of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. In 1952 he a PhD in physics and astronomy, with R. R. Wilson as his adviser.
From 1952 to 1958 Dave worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell’s 300 MeV and 1 GeV synchrotrons. From 1958 to 1998 Dave was a research scientist at MIT, where he first worked in the group of Louis Osborne at the 300 MeV and 6 GeV synchrotrons. In 1962 Dave invented the light pipe for large-area scintillators, a detector development that benefits particle physics to this day. In 1969 he received an indefinite appointment as a senior research scientist at MIT. He then worked at SLAC with Burton Richter on meson production by polarized gamma rays, and with Martin Pearl on the electroproduction of hadrons. Dave also worked at Fermilab in the group of Wit Busza measuring multiplicities of particles produced with high-energy protons.
Later Dave went to DESY in Hamburg, Germany, where he worked in the group of Samuel C. C. Ting on the MARK-J experiment. Dave then moved to CERN, where he worked in Ting’s MIT group on the construction of the L3 experiment for the Large Electron–Positron Collider, mainly on its calorimeters and magnet. Dave also worked on the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer experiment. He was decisive in the selection of the neodymium-iron-boron alloy for its permanent magnet.
Dave retired in 1998. From 1998 to 2008 he worked at CERN as an academic guest of ETH Zürich in the group of Felicitas Pauss with the status of emeritus member of the CMS collaboration. During this time Dave worked mainly on the CMS electromagnetic calorimeter and coauthored several publications on hadron damage to inorganic scintillators. His understanding that hadron damage to lead tungstate crystals was due to Rayleigh scattering off fission tracks was a decisive input to the decision to replace the CMS electromagnetic calorimeter endcaps.
From 2008 Dave continued to be active in CMS as an emeritus scientist and a member of the MIT group Christoph Paus. He relentlessly pursued a better understanding of the electromagnetic calorimeter performance evolution in view of the high-luminosity running of the LHC.
Dave was a great mentor and an inspiration to younger scientists working with him. Even in a well-advanced age, his curiosity for nature and science remained the one of a child: enthusiastic, motivated, untiring. He was an avid reader of scientific literature, where he continuously found ideas and inspiration. He can undoubtedly be considered a torchbearer for the very modern concept of interdisciplinarity in the sciences.
