Thomas Fields

Dr. Thomas Fields, a renowned physicist and former two-time director of Argonne’s High Energy Physics division, died at the age of 83 on June 27, 2014. He studied physics at Carnegie-Mellon University, where he received his BS in 1951 and his PhD in 1955. He became a professor at Northwestern University in 1961, before being appointed as the director of the High Energy Physics Division at Argonne National Laboratory in 1965. An expert in particle detection methods, he led the Advanced Photon Source project at Argonne in 1986-87, and the NuMI/MINOS Neutrino Oscillation project at Fermilab from 1998-1999. This work, and sabbaticals in Birmingham (UK) and at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, left him with friends and colleagues around the globe.

Tom’s interest in Bubble chambers began when he finished his Ph.D. at Carnegie Tech in 1955, and his advisor, Roger Sutton, suggested h build a “new type of detector called a bubble chamber.” He started with a 6-inch Hydrogen chamber, and in 1957-8 built a 10-inch Hydrogen chamber followed by a 10-inch Helium chamber when he moved to Northwestern and Argonne. For this, he learned how to build a superconducting magnet, the first one used in particle physics, and which is now owned by the Smithsonian Museum in Washington. In the 1960’s Bob Sachs invited him to become directory of the High Energy Physics Division, and a big challenge at that time was to assemble a team, led by Gale Pewitt, to construct the 12 foot hydrogen bubble chamber.

During the late 1960’s, he was the division director for High Energy Physics at Argonne while many experiments were being carried out at the Zero Gradient Synchrotron. In 1970, he was a member of a delegation negotiating the first agreements for exchanges in high energy physics between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and in 1979 he was a member of the first US/China committee for cooperation in high energy physics.

When the Zero Gradient Synchrotron closed in 1979, he became deeply involved in two new projects during the 1980’s: First, the study of hard collisions and jet production at Fermilab, in a collaboration with university groups from Penn, Wisconsin and Rice. Second the construction of an underground detector search for proton decay at Soudan MN, in collaboration with groups from Minnesota, Tufts, Oxford and Rutherford Lab. He also served a second term as HEP division director, and spent a year as the acting director of the new Advance Photon Source (APS) project.

After a second term as Division Director, he worked on a detector magnet design for an SSC experiment. When Tom tried to retire from managment, Fermilab director John People’s asked him to become project manager for the MINOS long-baseline neutrino project using a new neutrino beam from Fermilab and a large iron calorimeter at the Soudan mine in Minnesota. He continued working on many aspects of the MINOS experiment, helping to parameterize the seasonal behavior of cosmic rays in a paper that was published the month of his death. Also in retirement, Tom Fields was the author of Planning Life’s Projects, a book designed to encourage young people to take a more active role in creating the trajectory of their professional and personal lives.