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Robert (Bob) Langley is retired from Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and Sandia National Laboratories (SNL). He is Chief Scientific Officer of a small independent consulting company, Oak Ridge Scientific Consultants. He received his university degrees, B.S. (1959), M.S. (1960), and Ph.D. (1963), in physics from Georgia Institute of Technology. His major graduate school interest was in atomic and molecular physics. After graduating he served in the USAF at Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories in Bedford, Massachusetts. His research consisted of upper atmospheric research sampling the earth’s atmospheric constituents using balloons and rockets. He received a post-doctoral appointment to the Thermonuclear Division at ORNL and studied atomic and molecular reactions related to the study of magnetic fusion. Following the post-doctoral appointment he worked at SNL in the fields of upper atmospheric composition studies using lab-based accelerators with energies from a few kilovolts to 3.0 MeV and high-altitude rocket probe experiments. This research was followed by basic research investigations on ion impingement on solids using elastic ion-backscattering techniques. This included studies in (1) basic characteristics of metal barrier silicon detectors, (2) diffusion of metals in metals (e.g., Cu, Ag, and Au in Be), (3) oxidation effects on diffusion and intermetallic formation, and (4) effects of hydrogen and helium in metals. In parallel with the efforts at SNL he served as Radiation Physicist in the Radiation Oncology Group at St. Joseph Hospital in Albuquerque, New Mexico, consulting on calibration and maintenance of radiation sources and planning cancer-patient radiation protocols. In 1977, he returned to ORNL as Coordinator of the Impurity Study Program for the Fusion Energy Division with the responsibility of planning, presenting, and managing the program. In addition, he led experimental work in the study of plasma impurities in the edge region including impurity transport and plasma wall/limiter interactions and investigated methods to “clean” the very large vacuum vessels used in fusion research. During this time frame he served on MFE/DOE Task Group on Plasma Material Interaction, as Chair of the 5th International Conference on Plasma Surface Interactions in Controlled Fusion Devices, and as Organizer, Chair, and Proceedings Editor of AVS “Topical Conference on Surface Conditioning of Vacuum Systems.” Starting in 1980, he took a sabbatical leave to serve as Director of the Atomic and Molecular Data Center for Fusion, International Atomic Energy Agency, Vienna, Austria. After returning to the U.S. in 1981, he served as a Research Fellow at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, Princeton University, conducting research on high-energy neutral beam injectors and designing plasma diagnostics for TFTR, the major fusion plasma experiment at the time. He returned to ORNL to continue material studies of interest to fusion power generation. These included hydrogen and helium interaction with graphite, cleanup of fusion devices, pumping of the large vacuum chambers used in fusion research, gas feed systems and plasma-first wall interaction experiments. He retired from ORNL in 1994 and returned to serve in the International Atomic Energy Agency in the Atomic and Molecular Data Center for Fusion. Following this he returned to the U.S. and resumed his working retirement with a period of research at the Department of Physics, University of New Castle, Callaghan, NSW, Australia and served as visiting Senior Research Scientist working on vacuum science, materials analysis, and interaction of energetic particles with dense matter. In 1998, he returned to SNL to design, construct and test a beamline for the SNL tandem accelerator to very accurately measure H, D, and T in solid materials. He has more than 130 technical publications. Bob has been a member of AVS since 1974 and has served in many capacities that have included founding member of the Fusion Technology Division and later as Chair of the Division during its transition to the Plasma Science and Technology Division (PSTD). He was a founding member of the Tennessee Valley Chapter and served as the Program Chair for its annual meeting in 1984. He served as Associate Editor of JVST A for three years and represented the AVS at the IUVSTA for six years as both Vice-Chair and Chair of the PSTD. He was selected as an AVS Fellow in 2003. Course: |