Rolf Widerøe

Rolf Widerøe (1902 to 1996) was a Norwegian accelerator physicist who originated many particle acceleration concepts, including the resonance accelerator and the betatron concept. Born in Kristiania, now Oslo, he studied electrical engineering at Karlsruhe and Aachen, where his dissertation under Walter Rogowski built a linear accelerator prototype. His 1928 publication on resonating particles with a radio frequency field became the progenitor of high energy accelerators and was the basis for Ernest Lawrence and the cyclotron. During the war he worked on a betatron in Hamburg and in 1943 introduced the concept of colliding particles head-on in a storage ring. After the war he moved to Switzerland, collaborated with CERN from 1952 on the Proton Synchrotron, and published over 180 papers.