Reg Gibson 1939 - 2014
William Reginald Gibson was born on 27 July 1939 in Portadown, N. Ireland. He attended Queens University Belfast where he obtained his BSc and PhD degrees, and was appointed Assistant Lecturer in 1963. His research work was based at the Rutherford Laboratory 50 MeV Proton Linear Accelerator, where he, with colleagues, carried out experiments on elastic scattering, polarization, and nuclear reactions.
In 1965 he was appointed Lecturer at Queen Mary College (now Queen Mary University of London), where he remained for the rest of his career, retiring as Senior Lecturer and Senior Tutor in 2004.
During this time, with various colleagues from Queen Mary and with collaborators from other institutions, he worked on a variety of elementary particle physics projects spanning the energy range from 50 MeV to the highest available accelerator energies.
Using beams from the TRIUMF cyclotron in Vancouver he studied polarization parameters in nucleon-nucleon elastic scattering at energies between 200 MeV and 500 MeV. At the Nimrod accelerator he worked on kaon-nucleon polarization at several momenta around 1GeV/c, and on proton-proton elastic scattering at 7 GeV.
At the CERN proton synchrotron, the Queen Mary group designed a high intensity separated antiproton beam, spanning the momentum range 0.6 GeV/c to 2.4 GeV/c which they and collaborators used to study elastic scattering on protons, and annihilations into pion and kaon pairs. A subsequent experiment looked at these reactions with a polarized target. Several mesons were identified, and their quantum numbers were determined.
In the late 1970s Carlo Rubbia at CERN showed that it would be possible to convert the Super Proton Synchrotron into a proton-antiproton collider, thereby attaining much higher energy, and this was achieved using the stochastic cooling method devised by Simon van der Meer. An international collaboration including Queen Mary physicists was formed to design and build a universal detector, called UA1, to study these interactions. The W and Z particles were discovered in 1983, thereby verifying the predicted unification of the weak and electromagnetic forces. For this Rubbia and van der Meer received the 1984 Nobel Prize. Many more results came from these interactions, and Reg Gibson rightly regarded this work as the highlight of his career.
After this Reg joined a different Queen Mary group to work on the OPAL detector at the CERN Large Electron Positron collider that studied the W and Z particles in much more detail. Reg was responsible for testing parts of the Lead Glass Electromagnetic Endcap Calorimeter at Queen Mary and monitoring its performance during data taking at CERN.
Finally Reg worked on the design and construction of the ATLAS detector at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, specifically the Level-1 Calorimeter Trigger, but retired in 2004 several years before the start-up of collision physics.
Reg was Senior Tutor at Queen Mary for a long period, and many students will have interacted with and been helped by him. He was a congenial colleague and a great human being.
He is survived by his wife Dorothy, 3 children - Stephen, Christine and Richard and 9 grandchildren.
Peter Kalmus
Queen Mary University of London
