Name Thomas Stix | Role Physicist | |
Died April 16, 2001, Princeton, New Jersey, United States Books The theory of plasma waves, Waves in plasmas Education Princeton University (1953), California Institute of Technology Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Natural Sciences, US & Canada | ||
Thomas Howard Stix (July 12, 1924 – April 16, 2001) was an American physicist. Stix performed seminal work in plasma physics, and wrote the first mathematical treatment of the field in 1962's The Theory of Plasma Waves.
History
Born in St. Louis, Missouri on July 12, 1924, Stix grew up near Washington University. Stix’s family owned Rice-Stix Inc., a dry goods firm among largest businesses in St. Louis at the turn of the 20th Century. It continued operations until the 1950s. His family home on Forsyth Boulevard was eventually donated to Washington University and is now the Stix International House.
Stix graduated from John Burroughs School and served in the U.S. Army as a radio expert in the Pacific theater during and after World War II. After the war, he obtained his bachelor's degree from Caltech in 1948 and his doctorate from Princeton in 1953.
He worked for Project Matterhorn, a secret U.S. study of nuclear fusion, and developed the Stix coil to contain gases that were heated to solar temperatures with electromagnetic waves. Stix’s invention of the coil jump-started a period of intellectual productivity that revolutionized plasma heating research and whose influence is still felt in the field. Exemplary of this period was Stix’s 1975 paper “Fast Wave Heating of a Two-Component Plasma,” which remains one of the most cited papers ever published by the journal Nuclear Fusion.
Stix taught astrophysics at Princeton, and did much of his research at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (see Model C stellarator). In 1978, Stix was appointed Associate Director for Academic Affairs at PPPL. He pioneered and for many years served as director of Princeton’s Program in Plasma Physics, the first graduate-level program of its kind. In 1991, Princeton awarded its inaugural "University Award for Distinguished Teaching” to Stix for his contributions as a teacher and educator.
In 1962, Stix was elected Chair of the Division of Plasma Physics of the American Physical Society. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1969, leading to the first of his three sabbaticals at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.
In 1980, the American Physical Society awarded Stix its highest honor in the plasma physics field, the James Clerk Maxwell Prize in Plasma Physics, for his pioneering role in developing and formalizing the theory of wave propagation and wave heating in plasmas.
In 1999, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award by Fusion Power Associates.
Stix’s 1962 book, The Theory of Plasma Waves, was translated into several foreign languages including Japanese and Russian. It received a paperback reprint in 2012 and still sells and is taught at universities around the world.
Stix and his wife, Hazel Sherwin, were married for 51 years and together had two children, Susan Stix Fisher of New York, NY and Dr. Michael Sherwin Stix of Lexington, MA. Upon his death on April 16, 2001, of leukemia, Stix and his wife had been longtime residents of Princeton. His obituary in the New York Times noted that Stix's "elegant mastery of the literally infinite complexities of waves in electrified gases helped create a new field of science."
The American Physical Society created the Thomas H. Stix Award in Stix's honor in 2013. The award is presented annually to a plasma physics researcher with outstanding contributions early in their career.