Nicholas Christofilos

Who was Nicholas Christofilos?

Nicholas Constantine Christofilos was a Greek physicist.

Christofilos was born in Boston, Massachusetts and raised in Greece. He attended the National Technical University of Athens at age 18, and graduated with a degree in Electrical and Mechanical Engineering in 1938. He remained in Greece during World War II, working for an Athens elevator maintenance company during the Nazi occupation. He later founded his own elevator company. During all of this, he maintained an amateur interest in accelerator physics and high-energy particle physics, and studied German and American texts on the subjects extensively.

In 1946 he independently developed ideas for a synchrotron and in 1949 he conceived the strong-focusing principle. Rather than publishing in a journal he submitted a patent application in the US and Greece. His discovery went unnoticed for several years, and strong focusing was rediscovered by Ernest Courant et al. in 1952, and applied to accelerators at BNL, Cornell and CERN.

Christofilos was offered a position at Brookhaven in 1953. In 1956 he joined Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to continue his work on the Astron, a proposed fusion reactor under the Sherwood Project. At LLNL, Christofilos worked on a number of military projects. He became a member of JASON and was the principal behind Operation Argus, a series of high-altitude nuclear detonations intended to create a radiation belt in the upper regions of the Earth's atmosphere as a defence against Soviet ICBMs.