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Nicholas Constantine Christofilos (Νικόλαος Χριστοφίλου) (December 16, 1916 – September 24, 1972) was a Greek-American physicist.

Christofilos was born in Boston, Massachusetts and raised in Greece. He was working for an Athens elevator company when he became interested in high-energy particle physics.

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 in 1952 and applied to accelerators at Brookhaven, Cornell and CERN.

Christofilos was offered a position at Brookhaven in 1953. In 1956 he joined Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) 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.

In the early 1960s Christofilos proposed Extreme low Frequency Waves (ELF) as practical way to communicate with submarines. The concept was tested in a 22,500-square-mile (58,000 km2) antenna system called Project Sanguine.

In 1963 he was awarded the Elliott Cresson Medal.
References

A.C. Melissinos (University of Rochester) (1993). "Nicholas C. Christofilos: His contributions to physics.". Proceedings, Advanced accelerator physics: 1067–1081.
Foster, John S, T. Kenneth Fowler and Frederick E. Mills (1973). "Nicholas C. Christofilos (obituary)". Physics Today 26: 109–115.
Christofilos, N.. "Focusing System for Ions and Electrons". US Patent No. 2,736,799.
Courant, E. D.; Livingston, M. S.; Snyder, H. S.; Blewett, J. P, Brookhaven National Laboratory (1958). "Origin of the "Strong-Focusing" Principle". Physical Review 91 (1): 202–203. Bibcode 1953PhRv...91..202C. doi:10.1103/PhysRev.91.202.2.

External links

[1] Nicholas C. Christofilos, His Contributions to Physics, A.C. Melissinos, 1993 (Talk given at CERN, Rhodes, Greece, 1993)
[2] The Sixties at LLNL. Mentions Christofilos and the ASTRON project.
[3] Greek Fire – Christofilos and the Astron Project in America's Fusion Program, Elisheva Coleman, Princeton University Junior Thesis, 2004

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