Harold Ticho Physics Archive

A UNIQUE WINDOW INTO THE WORLD OF POST-WAR PARTICLE PHYSICS, INCLUDING ARTIFACTS FROM HYDROGEN BUBBLE CHAMBER EXPERIMENTS WITH THE ALVAREZ GROUP THAT LED TO THE NOBEL PRIZE

Included in this lot are artifacts from Harold Ticho’s time as a member of the Alvarez Group at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, during which he designed elements of the beamline separator. Beamline separators were key instruments in hydrogen bubble chamber experiments as they literally separated particles and routed them through the bubble chambers for observation. Luis Alvarez, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1968 for discovering resonance states through the use of hydrogen bubble chambers, referenced Ticho’s designs in his Nobel Lecture. 

The most visually striking artifact from this work is a large-scale bubble chamber track photograph. Almost six feet in length, this enlarged image was created so the team could measure particle tracks by hand. While most track photographs were discarded after use, this image was mounted and kept by Ticho as a memento of the experiment and his contribution to the field as well as a tool for teaching future physicists. This image is dynamic not only in its aesthetic but in its historic use in furthering our understanding of the universe. 

Two pieces from the separator itself are included here: a cylindrical separator insulator and an L-shaped separator standoff insulator. The black coloration in the stonework of the cylindrical insulator was caused by electrical discharge during experimentation. While small in size, the L-shaped separator standoff component is a historic artifact that testifies to the brilliant engineering involved in the study and exploration of physics. The hydrogen bubble chamber diagram, an original schematic detailing the infrastructure of the experiment, demonstrates the placement of the separators. In a recorded interview of his work on the project, Ticho explained that the design used to generate the images in Luis Alvarez’s published Nobel lecture was one of his contributions. 

Harold Klein Ticho was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia in 1921. As a youth, he fled the Nazis and emigrated to the United States where he studied physics under Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago. Ticho’s Master’s thesis, completed in 1944 and included in this lot, suggested how to improve the fidelity of nuclear timing devices. His early work indicates the continued urgency and innovation in physics through the end of World War II through the post-war period. 

A throughline in Ticho’s rigorous work is the ambition to improve, innovate, and further understanding of particle physics. Ticho’s work with Luis Alvarez’s team is only one facet of his groundbreaking work in experimental elementary particle physics.

A further highlight of this lot is Ticho’s meticulously detailed synchrotron research notebook, filled with pages of handwritten notes; correspondence with suppliers; a pasted-in Physical Review; hand-plotted and annotated spectra; and 117 Kodak safety film contact strips recording oscilloscope and scintillation traces. Marked “RESEARCH” in Ticho’s hand, this document details vanadium and niobium activation runs at the UCLA cyclotron and demonstrates the rigorous work involved in the research-to-publication pipeline of Cold War physics. 

Another unique item in this lot is a paper binder containing drafts, FORTRAN printouts, and handwritten notes and letters relating to the φ 1020 meson discovery; as well as a drafted manuscript of “The Existence and Properties of the ‘φ’ Meson’.” This work is the subject of two fragments of letters from J.J. Sakurai in this archive. These documents not only demonstrate Ticho’s rigorous labor, they also illuminate the international academic race to define and situate the φ Meson. 

Over the course of his career, Ticho was awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships (1966-67 and 1973-74) and served as chairman of the Department of Physics at UCLA from 1967-1971 before serving as dean of the Division of Physical Sciences in the College of Letters and Sciences at UCLA from 1974-1983. After 35 years as a professor at UCLA, Ticho went to UC San Diego where he taught and led high level administrative positions in physics from 1983 until his retirement in 1991. 

Ticho was both a prolific researcher and a talented leader, and his work proved instrumental in developing the quark model of the nucleon. Ticho’s leadership as an academic and as a university administrator helped shape the understanding of the building blocks of matter and fostered an exciting new era of particle physics.