Richard V. E. Lovelace

Lovelace is the son of city planner Eldridge Lovelace and Marjorie Van Evera Lovelace.[1][2] He graduated from Washington University in St. Louis in 1964 with a BS in physics and after receiving a National Science Foundation fellowship earned his PhD from Cornell University in 1970, also in physics,[3] with a dissertation titled "Theory and analysis of interplanetary scintillations".[4]

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 Plasma Physics Laboratory in the 1970s and in 1990 was a visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin on a Guggenheim Fellowship.[5] He was elected an overseas fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge University, and visiting scientist at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, and in 1999 was Orsan Anderson Visiting Scholar at Los Alamos National Laboratory.[6] 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 in 1988.

He became a fellow of the American Physical Society 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,[6] and in 2010 became an editorial board member of Journal of Computational Astrophysics and Cosmology. He was a member of the James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics committee of the American Physical Society in 2009-2011 and a member of the Advisory board of the Guggenheim Fellowship Foundation from 1994 to 2005.

In 1968 (10 November), Lovelace discovered period ${\displaystyle P\approx 33}$ ms of the Crab Pulsar.[7] As a graduate student working at Arecibo Observatory, Lovelace developed a Fast Fourier transform program.[8] The special code named Gallop in Fortran was adapted to run on the Arecibo Observatory's CDC 3200 computer, which had a memory of 32,000 words of 24 bit length. The code was integer-based, using half-words of 12 bits, and was able to do the fast Fourier transform of N=16,384 signal samples. The 8192 signal power values were printed out on a folded raster scan. The signal to noise ratio increases as N increases. This was the largest value of N that could be handled by the Arecibo computer. This program helped to separate the periodic pulsar signal from the noise, and one night he discovered the period of the Crab pulsar, which is approximately 33 ms (33.09 ms).[7]

This was the fastest pulsar found at that time.[9][10] This discovery helped to cement the idea that pulsars were rotating neutron stars.[11][12] Before that, many scientists believed that pulsars were pulsating white dwarfs or neutron stars.[13][14]

In 1976 Lovelace proposed a model of jets from magnetized disks surrounding massive black holes in galaxies.[15][16] The model is based on the dynamo mechanism 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.[17][18][19]

Lovelace proposed the Rossby waves instability in accretion disks.[20] These waves form anti-cyclonic vortices in accretion discs, where dust particles accumulate and may form planets.[21][22] He also developed the theory of the stability of electron and ion rings,[23] which is used in current laboratory experiments on magnetic confinement fusion (for example at TAE Technologies in California).

Lovelace proposed a new method of measuring magnetic fields,[24] developed a pioneering theory of intense ion beams in pulsed diodes, which are currently used in laboratories,[25] and proposed the theory of magnetic insulation, which is used in laboratories including at Sandia National Laboratories.[26]

He invented a trapping mechanism of spin-polarized neutral gas, which has been experimentally demonstrated.[27][28] He also developed theory and simulations of scintillations in the interstellar medium[29] and discovered the Kolmogorov nature of the turbulence in the solar wind.[30]

In 1991, he started the US-Russia collaboration in plasma astrophysics. This collaboration helped to achieve many pioneering results in science.[31] In 2000, he initiated the US-Kazakhstan Astrophysics Collaboration.

In collaboration with Russian mathematicians, Lovelace developed a global, three-dimensional numerical model of the disk-accreting magnetized stars. Many pioneering results were obtained with this 3D MHD model.[32] He provided the first estimate of the electric current in the astrophysical jet: ${\displaystyle 3\times 10^{18}}$ Amps.[33]

Lovelace is married and has two daughters.[1] He lives in Ithaca, New York.[34]