Mark Oliphant, from Adelaide University to be at cutting edge of nuclear fission and Manhattan atom bomb
Mark Oliphant was on the MAUD Committee that confirmed in 1941 that an atomic bomb was feasible.
Mark Oliphant played an important role in the first experimental demonstration of nuclear fission and also developing nuclear weapons in the 20th Century.
Born and raised in Adelaide, Oliphant graduated from Adelaide University in 1922.
He was awarded an 1851 Exhibition Scholarship in 1927 on the strength of the research he had done on mercury and he studied under Ernest Rutherford at the University of Cambridge’s Cavendish laboratory. There, he used a particle accelerator to fire heavy hydrogen nuclei (deuterons) at various targets. He discovered the nuclei of herium-3 (helions) and tritium (tritons). He found that, when they reacted with each other, the particles released had far more energy than they started with. Energy had been liberated from inside the nucleus: a result of nuclear fusion.
In 1937, Oliphant became Poynting professor of physics at Birmingham University where he tried to build a 150cm cyclotron. This project was postponed due to World War II.
He became involved with developing radar. His group created a radical design, the cavity magnetron, that made microwave radar possible.
Oliphant was on the high-level scientific MAUD Committee that reported in 1941, that an atomic bomb was feasible, and might be produced as early as 1943.
Oliphant was instrumental in spreading this finding in the United States, thereby starting what became the Manhattan Project. Later in the war, he worked on it with his friend Ernest Lawrence at the Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley, California,, developing electromagnetic isotope separation.
After the war, Oliphant returned to Australia as first director of the Research School of Physical Sciences and Engineering at the new Australian National University, where he started the design and construction of the world's largest (500 megajoule) homopolar generator.
He retired in 1976 but was appointed governor of South Australia on the advice of premier Don Dunstan.
