Roy Schwitters

Career

Schwitters was a researcher involved with the MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Science's Moby Dick project at the Cambridge Electron Accelerator in the late 1960s.

An early major accomplishment in Schwitters' career was to oversee the design and construction of the Cylindrical Wire Spark Chambers of the Mark I (detector) experiment, which operated at the interaction point of the SPEAR collider at the Stanford SLAC Laboratory from 1973 to 1977, and major involvement in the analysis and interpretation of the data that resulted in the discovery of the J/ψ particle (which resulted in the Nobel Prize for Burton Richter in 1976). A description of the discovery of the J/ψ particle and his key role in this discovery is given by this article/talk from Burton Richter.

Another major accomplishment in Schwitters' career was as a founding member and becoming the associate head in 1980 of the Collider Detector at Fermilab experiment, with significant involvement in managing the initial construction and development of CDF, leading up to the initial Run 0 commissioning run before any upgrades (1988-1989).

Schwitters was director of the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) in Waxahachie, Texas starting in 1989, and ending in October 1993 when the funding for its construction was terminated by Congress. During the events leading up to the project's cancellation, Schwitters was famously quoted, "The SSC is becoming the victim of the revenge of the C students." In a 2021 interview, he speculated that, had the project been completed, it would have led to the discovery of the Higgs boson particle in Waxahachie 10 years before its eventual discovery at CERN's Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland and attracted an equivalent number of visitors to CERN's 120,000 per year.

Beginning 2004, Schwitters led the University of Texas Maya Muon Tomography research team. From 2005 to 2011, he was the chair of the JASON Defense Advisory Group.

Schwitters died at the age of 78 due to cancer, in Orcas Island, Washington.