William M. Hooke

William McClure Hooke passed away on June 10, 2014 in Chapel Hill, NC. Bill Hooke was a plasma physicist and a pioneer in the field of radio frequency (RF) plasma heating for controlled fusion applications. He was born on November 17, 1930 to Lucy and Malcolm Hooke of Greensboro, NC. After graduating from UNC with a degree in physics, he went on to receive his PhD in Physics from Princeton University in 1958. He married Nancy Smith on June 3, 1952 and they shared 62 years together. They lived in Princeton, NJ from 1953 to 1986 where Bill was a Principal Research Physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. Bill and Nancy lived in retirement in Chapel Hill, NC, where he continued to consult at UNC-Chapel Hill, NC State University, the Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory (TUNL) at Duke University, and several companies. Nancy passed away two months before Bill after a long battle with Alzheimer’s. Bill is survived by his son Robert, daughter-in-law Lisa, and grandson, William Robert Hooke.

Bill Hooke joined PPPL in 1959, just after nuclear fusion research became declassified. Magnetically confined fusion devices, like stellarators and later tokamaks, need a method of plasma heating in order to reach fusion temperatures. Bill initially headed the Princeton B66 mirror / stellarator project where he led the effort to apply high power ion cyclotron waves (ICRF) to plasma heating. Bill and coworkers produced an extensive body of work the 1960’s on ICRF wave coupling, propagation, absorption, and the resulting plasma heating.

Tokamak devices with much better confinement properties came along in the 1970’s. At about that time Bill turned his attention to another RF mode, the lower-hybrid (LH) wave, which could be launched from compact waveguide antennas. Bill led experiments on linear plasma devices which characterized the launching and propagation of LH waves, and he then worked to implement this method on the large tokamaks then operating. It was discovered that LH waves in certain regimes were readily absorbed by electrons and Bill made the most of what the physics allowed. By launching LH waves in one toroidal direction, Bill’s team on the PLT tokamak showed that 100’s of kA of plasma current could be sustained entirely by a fast electron tail pushed by LH waves, a theoretical prediction up to that point. The PLT team also showed that the tokamak plasma current could be started from zero and ramped-up entirely by waves without the usual transformer action. Theorists Fisch and Karney subsequently included electric fields in Fisch’s original current drive theory to explain the PLT ramp-up data, a nice example of experiment and theory feeding off each other. Bill shared the 1984 APS DPP Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research for this work which he led.

Bill was interested in non-fusion plasma topics as well. In the 1960’s he organized a multi-year program to investigate solid state plasmas in order to give graduate students a more accessible means of experimenting with plasmas, studying helicon waves in InSb and plasma diffusion in Ge. During his retirement in Chapel Hill, he helped develop an efficient electron-cyclotron-resonance-heated plasma ionizer for a polarized proton and deuteron ion source at TUNL, developed plasma sources for diamond deposition on silicon substrates, and helped develop atmospheric pressure plasmas for surface cleaning and decontamination.

Bill was adept at working with large groups, many with conflicting ideas, in order to carry out experiments in the “big science” environment of fusion experiments. He was not only an excellent physicist but a great humanist also. Bill often said that the best part of his job was the people, and he enjoyed interacting and collaborating with many coworkers, visiting scientists, and humanists over the years. After retirement, he held regular ‘office hours’ at several lunch counters in Chapel Hill, where he continued as an informal mentor for many younger colleagues, remained very good at suggesting important physics problems, and helped develop many physics ideas that needed work. Bill thought that controlled fusion would eventually be practical but was careful not to oversell its near term potential. “Be serious, but not earnest,” Bill said. His enthusiasm inspired those around him and he will be missed very much.

Stefano Bernabei, Princeton, NJ
James Stevens, Albuquerque, NM
Thomas Clegg, Chapel Hill, NC

Photo Credit: Physics Department, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill