Mark Oliphant - Cavendish Laboratory

Cavendish Laboratory

In 1925, Oliphant heard a speech given by the New Zealander physicist, Ernest Rutherford, and he decided to work for him – an ambition that he fulfilled by earning a position at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge in 1927. It was carrying out the most advanced research into nuclear physics in the world at the time. It was at the Cavendish, for example, that the atom was first split in 1932. Among other research, Oliphant worked on the artificial disintegration of the atomic nucleus and positive ions, and he designed and built complex particle accelerators, being the first to conceive the concept of the proton synchrotron.

Oliphant's primary contribution was his discovery of the nuclei of helium 3 (helions) and tritium (tritons). He also discovered that heavy hydrogen nuclei could be made to react with each other (tritons and helions being the products, along with protons and neutrons). This nuclear fusion reaction is the basis of a hydrogen bomb and also hypothetical thermonuclear fusion power reactors. Ten years later, the American scientist Edward Teller pressed to use Oliphant's discovery in order to build one. Oliphant had not foreseen this:

. . . we had no idea whatever that this would one day be applied to make hydrogen bombs. Our curiosity was just curiosity about the structure of the nucleus of the atom, and the discovery of these reactions was purely, as the Americans would put it, coincidental.