Richard Van Evera Lovelace is an American astrophysicist and

plasma physicist Plasma ()πλάσμα
, Henry George Liddell, R ...

. He is best known for the discovery of the period of the

pulsar A pulsar (from ''pulsating radio source'') is a highly magnetized rotating neutron star that emits beams of electromagnetic radiation out of its magnetic poles. This radiation can be observed only when a beam of emission is pointing toward Ea ...

in the

Crab Nebula The Crab Nebula (catalogue designations Messier object, M1, New General Catalogue, NGC 1952, Taurus (constellation), Taurus A) is a supernova remnant and pulsar wind nebula in the constellation of Taurus (constellation), Taurus. The common name ...

( Crab pulsar), which helped to prove that pulsars are rotating

neutron star A neutron star is the collapsed core of a massive supergiant star, which had a total mass of between 10 and 25 solar masses, possibly more if the star was especially metal-rich. Except for black holes and some hypothetical objects (e.g. white ...

s, for developing a magnetic model of

astrophysical jet An astrophysical jet is an astronomical phenomenon where outflows of ionised matter are emitted as an extended beam along the axis of rotation. When this greatly accelerated matter in the beam approaches the speed of light, astrophysical jets bec ...

s from

galaxies A galaxy is a system of stars, stellar remnants, interstellar gas, dust, dark matter, bound together by gravity. The word is derived from the Greek ' (), literally 'milky', a reference to the Milky Way galaxy that contains the Solar System. ...

, and for developing a model of Rossby waves in

accretion disk An accretion disk is a structure (often a circumstellar disk) formed by diffuse material in orbital motion around a massive central body. The central body is typically a star. Friction, uneven irradiance, magnetohydrodynamic effects, and other fo ...

s. He organized a US-Russia collaboration in plasma astrophysics, which focused on modeling of plasma accretion and outflows from magnetized rotating stars.

Early life and education

Lovelace is the son of city planner

Eldridge Lovelace Eldridge Hirst Lovelace (March 16, 1913 – November 7, 2008) was a city planner and author who prepared comprehensive plans for many large US cities. Early life Lovelace was born in Kansas City, Kansas, on March 16, 1913. He was married to ...

and Marjorie Van Evera Lovelace.Eldridge Lovelace obituary
''Kansas City Star'', November 27, 2008.
''New York Times'', December 23, 1972. He graduated from

Washington University in St. Louis Washington University in St. Louis (WashU or WUSTL) is a private research university with its main campus in St. Louis County, and Clayton, Missouri. Founded in 1853, the university is named after George Washington. Washington University is r ...

in 1964 with a BS in physics and after receiving a National Science Foundation fellowship earned his PhD from

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...

in 1970, also in physics,"Richard V E Lovelace"
College of Engineering, Cornell University, retrieved January 2, 2021. with a dissertation titled ''Theory and analysis of interplanetary scintillations''.

Career

Lovelace began his career as a research associate at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and the Cornell University Laboratory of Plasma Studies. In 1972 he became an assistant professor at Cornell, and in 1984 a full professor. He spent a year as a visiting scientist at the

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...

Plasma Physics Laboratory in the 1970s and in 1990 was a visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin on a

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

. He was elected an overseas fellow at

Churchill College Churchill College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge, England. It has a primary focus on science, engineering and technology, but still retains a strong interest in the arts and humanities. In 1958, a trust was establish ...

, Cambridge University, and visiting scientist at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, and in 1999 was Orsan Anderson Visiting Scholar at

Los Alamos National Laboratory Los Alamos National Laboratory (often shortened as Los Alamos and LANL) is one of the sixteen research and development laboratories of the United States Department of Energy (DOE), located a short distance northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico, ...

."Richard V.E. Lovelace"
Department of Astronomy, College of Arts and Sciences, Cornell University, retrieved January 2, 2021. He has a joint appointment at Cornell in the Astronomy and Applied Engineering Physics departments, and directed the Master of Engineering Program from 1991 to 2000. He was awarded the Excellence in Teaching Prize of the engineering honor society

Tau Beta Pi The Tau Beta Pi Association (commonly Tau Beta Pi, , or TBP) is the oldest engineering honor society and the second oldest collegiate honor society in the United States. It honors engineering students in American universities who have shown a ...

in 1988. He became a fellow of the

American Physical Society The American Physical Society (APS) is a not-for-profit membership organization of professionals in physics and related disciplines, comprising nearly fifty divisions, sections, and other units. Its mission is the advancement and diffusion of k ...

in 2000, was divisional associate editor for '' Physical Review Letters'' for Plasma Physics from 1997 to 2000, in 2003 became associate editor of ''Physics of Plasmas'', and in 2010 became an editorial board member of ''

Journal of Computational Astrophysics and Cosmology A journal, from the Old French ''journal'' (meaning "daily"), may refer to: *Bullet journal, a method of personal organization * Diary, a record of what happened over the course of a day or other period *Daybook, also known as a general journal, ...

''.Editorial Board of the "Journal of Computational Astrophysics and Cosmology"
/ref> He was a member of the James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics committee of the

in 2009-2011 and a member of the Advisory board of the

Foundation from 1994 to 2005.

Research

In 1968, Lovelace and his collaborators discovered a rapidly pulsing radio source, the Crab Pulsar, measuring its period to be approximately 33 milliseconds."Out of the zenith. Jodrell Bank 1957-1970"
Sir. Bernard Lovell 1973, London: Oxford University Press, pp 1-255 (see page159). As a graduate student working at

Arecibo Observatory The Arecibo Observatory, also known as the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center (NAIC) and formerly known as the Arecibo Ionosphere Observatory, is an observatory in Barrio Esperanza, Arecibo, Puerto Rico owned by the US National Science F ...

, Lovelace developed a version of the

Fast Fourier transform A fast Fourier transform (FFT) is an algorithm that computes the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) of a sequence, or its inverse (IDFT). Fourier analysis converts a signal from its original domain (often time or space) to a representation in th ...

program "Gauss and the history of the fast Fourier transform"
Heideman, Michael T., Johnson, Don H., Burrus, Charles Sidney 1984. (PDF). IEEE ASSP Magazine. 1 (4): 14–21. which was adapted to run on the Arecibo Observatory's

CDC 3200 The CDC 3000 series ("thirty-six hundred" of "thirty-one hundred") computers from Control Data Corporation were mid-1960s follow-ons to the CDC 1604 and CDC 924 systems. Over time, a range of machines were produced - divided into * the 48-bit upp ...

computer. "On the Discovery of the Period of the Crab Nebula Pulsar"
Cornell University This program helped to separate the periodic pulsar signal from the noise, and one night he discovered the period of the Crab pulsar."Astrophysical formulae. space, time, matter and cosmology"
Kenneth R. Lang 2014, Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg A few weeks earlier, observers from the

National Radio Astronomy Observatory The National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) is a federally funded research and development center of the United States National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. for the purpose of radio a ...

reported about two pulsating sources near the Crab Nebula, with no evident periodicities."Pulsating radio sources near Crab Nebula"
Howard, W. E., Staelin, D. H., Reifenstein, E. C. 1968, IAU Circ., No. 2110, #2"Pulsating radio sources near the crab nebula"
Staelin, David H. and Reifenstein, Edward C., III, December 1968, Science, Volume 162, Issue 3861, pp. 1481-1483 Lovelace and collaborators found that one of pulsars (the NP 0532) is located in the center of the Crab Nebula and found its period with a high precision: 33.09 ms. This was the fastest

found at that time. This discovery helped to prove the idea that

pulsars A pulsar (from ''pulsating radio source'') is a highly magnetized rotating neutron star that emits beams of electromagnetic radiation out of its magnetic poles. This radiation can be observed only when a beam of emission is pointing toward Ea ...

were rotating

neutron stars A neutron star is the collapsed core of a massive supergiant star, which had a total mass of between 10 and 25 solar masses, possibly more if the star was especially metal-rich. Except for black holes and some hypothetical objects (e.g. white ...

."Rotating neutron stars as the origin of the pulsating radio sources"
T. Gold 1968, Nature, Volume 218, Issue 5143, pp. 731-732"Recent observations of pulsars support the rotating neutron star hypothesis."
T. Gold, 1969, Nature, Volume 221, Issue 5175, pp. 25-27. Before that, many scientists believed that pulsars were pulsating

white dwarf A white dwarf is a stellar core remnant composed mostly of electron-degenerate matter. A white dwarf is very dense: its mass is comparable to the Sun's, while its volume is comparable to the Earth's. A white dwarf's faint luminosity comes fro ...

s or

s.“Observations of a rapidly pulsating radio source”
A. Hewish, S. J. Bell, J. D. H. Pilkington, P. F. Scott and R. A. Collins 1968, Nature, 217, 709-713. In 1976 Lovelace proposed a model of jets from magnetized disks surrounding massive

black hole A black hole is a region of spacetime where gravitation, gravity is so strong that nothing, including light or other Electromagnetic radiation, electromagnetic waves, has enough energy to escape it. The theory of general relativity predicts t ...

s in galaxies."Dynamo model of double radio sources"
R. V. E. Lovelace 1976, ''Nature'' 262 (5570), 649-652.“Accretion disc electrodynamics - a model for double radio sources”
Blandford, R. 1976, MNRAS, 176, 465-481 (see p. 465) The model is based on the

dynamo mechanism In physics, the dynamo theory proposes a mechanism by which a celestial body such as Earth or a star generates a magnetic field. The dynamo theory describes the process through which a rotating, convecting, and electrically conducting fluid c ...

acting in the magnetized accretion disk surrounding a black hole or other gravitating object. The idea of the magnetically-driven jets and winds has been cited by the astronomical community. ``Hydromagnetic flows from accretion discs and the production of radio jets R. D. Blandford, and D. G. Payne 1982, MNRAS, 199, 883-903 (see p. 884)``Self-similar models of magnetized accretion disks
A. Konigl 1989, Astrophysical Journal, 342, 208-223 (see p. 208)“Black holes, white dwarfs, and neutron stars: the physics of compact objects”
S. L. Shapiro and S. A. Teukolsky 1983, A Wiley-Interscience Publication, New York: Wiley, pp 1-645 (see p. 437) He also developed the theory of

scintillation Scintillation can refer to: *Scintillation (astronomy), atmospheric effects which influence astronomical observations *Interplanetary scintillation, fluctuations of radio waves caused by the solar wind *Scintillation (physics), a flash of light pro ...

s in the

interstellar medium In astronomy, the interstellar medium is the matter and radiation that exist in the space between the star systems in a galaxy. This matter includes gas in ionic, atomic, and molecular form, as well as dust and cosmic rays. It fills interstella ...

"Refractive and diffractive scattering in the interstellar medium"
J. M. Cordes, A Pidwerbetsky, R. V. E. Lovelace ''The Astrophysical Journal'' 310, 737-767 and discovered the Kolmogorov nature of the

turbulence In fluid dynamics, turbulence or turbulent flow is fluid motion characterized by chaotic changes in pressure and flow velocity. It is in contrast to a laminar flow, which occurs when a fluid flows in parallel layers, with no disruption between ...

in the solar wind."Analysis of observations of interplanetary scintillations"
R. V. E. Lovelace, E. E. Salpeter, L. E. Sharp, & D. E. Harries 1970, ApJ, 159, p. 1047. Lovelace proposed the Rossby wave instability in

s "Rossby wave instability of Keplerian accretion disks"
R. V. E. Lovelace, H. Li, S. A. Colgate, A. F. Nelson 1999, ''The Astrophysical Journal'' 513 (2), 805. These waves form anti-cyclonic

vortices In fluid dynamics, a vortex ( : vortices or vortexes) is a region in a fluid in which the flow revolves around an axis line, which may be straight or curved. Vortices form in stirred fluids, and may be observed in smoke rings, whirlpools in th ...

in accretion discs, where dust particles accumulate and may form planets. A Major Asymmetric Dust Trap in a Transition Disk
N. van der Marel, E. F. van Dishoeck, S. Bruderer, etc. 2013, Science Vol. 340, Issue 6137, pp. 1199-1202 Astrophysics of planet formation
P. J. Armitage, Cambridge University Press He developed a theory of the stability of electron and ion rings which has been used in plasma fusion experiments at Cornell."Intense pulsed ion beams for fusion applications"
S. Humphries Jr. 1980, Nuclear Fusion 20, 1549-1612, see pp. 1560, 1572, 1589 Lovelace also has significant contributions to plasma physics. He developed the theory of the stability of electron and ion rings."Low-frequency stability of Astron configurations"
R. V. E. Lovelace 1975, ''Physical Review Letters'' 35 (3), 162-164. Lovelace developed a pioneering theory of intense

ion beam An ion beam is a type of charged particle beam consisting of ions. Ion beams have many uses in electronics manufacturing (principally ion implantation) and other industries. A variety of ion beam sources exists, some derived from the mercury ...

s in pulsed diodes, which are currently used in laboratories."Generation of intense ion beams in pulsed diodes"
R. N. Sudan and R. V. Lovelace 1973, ''Physical Review Letters'' 31 (19), 1174. He also proposed the theory of magnetic insulation, which is used in laboratories."Theory of magnetic insulation"
R. V. Lovelace, E. Ott 1974, ''The Physics of Fluids'' 17 (6), 1263-1268. Lovelace invented a trapping mechanism of spin-polarized neutral gas, which has been experimentally demonstrated."Magnetic confinement of a neutral gas"
R. V. E. Lovelace, C. Mehanian, T. J. Tommila, D. M. Lee 1985, ''Nature'' 318 (6041), 30-36."Storage rings for spin polarized hydrogen"
D. Thompson, R. V. E. Lovelace, D. M. Lee 1989, ''Journal of the Optical Society of America'', 611.

Personal life

As of 2008 Lovelace was married; he has two daughters(Jennifer & Evera) . He lives in

Ithaca Ithaca most commonly refers to: *Homer's Ithaca, an island featured in Homer's ''Odyssey'' *Ithaca (island), an island in Greece, possibly Homer's Ithaca *Ithaca, New York, a city, and home of Cornell University and Ithaca College Ithaca, Ithaka ...

, New York.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Lovelace, Richard V. E. Living people Year of birth missing (living people) American astrophysicists American plasma physicists Cornell University faculty Cornell University College of Engineering faculty Cornell University alumni Washington University in St. Louis alumni People from Ithaca, New York Fellows of the American Physical Society