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Colloquium in honour of the “Lord of the Rings”
Helmut Dosch awards Gus Voss with the golden DESY pin.
What better title than “Lord of the Rings“ for a colloquium held at DESY on 4 September on the occasion of the 80th birthday of Gustav-Adolf Voss? Voss was a member of the DESY Directorate and head of the accelerator division – and thus many accelerator rings - from 1973 until 1994. The Chairman of the DESY Board of Directors Helmut Dosch, awarded him for his outstanding contributions to the conception and building of new accelerators with a golden DESY pin.
The “Lord of the Accelerator Rings” spearheaded an exceedingly productive era at DESY, said Dosch. The construction of the electron-positron accelerator PETRA, completed in 1978, is considered to be Voss’ masterpiece. Both the calculated construction time of four years and the 100-million-Deutschmark cost were under budget by considerable margins.
Reinhard Brinkmann, head of the accelerator division, gave a review of 22 years of “Gustav-Adolf Voss at DESY“- a time in which happened, among others, the construction of the HERA ring.
Herman Winick from the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Stanford, US, knows Voss not only from their time at Harvard. At the end of the 90s, they together launched the SESAME project: the first synchrotron radiation source in the Middle East. The facility in the city Allan in Jordan inherited the storage ring of BESSY-I in Berlin and was inaugurated in November 2008.
The American Nobel laureate in physics, Burton Richter, who was connected live by video conference during this event, honoured Voss' achievements and visions in the field of linear accelerators.
Norbert Holtkamp, former supervisor in the accelerator division of DESY and today deputy director of the ITER fusion project, currently under construction in Cadarache, France, drew a very personal balance of his long-time cooperation with Voss. “Without the things he taught me, I would never be where I am today professionally.”
Programme and Photos of the Colloquium
