Messages

Great to have worked with you and collaborated many times over these many years.

Eli Rosenberg

It's been great fun working w/ you on ATLAS - since 1994 - time flies!

Steven Errede

I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to work with you on ATLAS experiment. Thank you very much for your constant support and help that you have been giving to me for the last 18 years. Best wishes to you and Carla.

Fukun Tang

Warm congratulations for your joining the Emeriti.

Riccardo Levi-Setti

I look forward to continuing to work with you in this new phase of your career.

David Strom

Your guidance and inspiration have been invaluable and have, in fact, completely altered my course through experimental physics...for the better! Thank you, and all the best for the future.

David Miller

You have had a tremendous career in particle physics - from the days of pion scattering the the old muon lab to OPAL and now on ATLAS. It has been a privilige to have had the opportunity to work with you on ATLAS and I hope that as Professor Emeritus we can continue to work together for many years to come.

Jimmy Proudfoot

Congratulations on such a great career and most heartfelt thanks! It was a great privilege to be a student of yours. Let me wish you many more satisfactions in the forthcoming years!

Francesco Spanò

Looking forward to seeing you at the symposium! Greetings from California!

Martina Hurwitz

Congratulations on a distinguished career and for your contributions and dedication to particle physics. It was an honor and privilege to have been your student. Best wishes to you and Carla in the years ahead!

Joseph Curry

It's been a thrill for me as a news officer to cover the UChicago ATLAS group's contributions to the research and discoveries at CERN. Thank you, Jim.

Steve Koppes

Congratulations and welcome

Peter Freund

Many congratulations!

Craig Hogan

Welcome to the ranks of the un-retired!

Jon Rosner

Congratulations Jim on an illustrious career; and for all your help during my stint as EFI Director, I am deeply grateful.

Emil Martinec

It is with much regret that I'll not be able to attend. Please pass on my warmest greetings to Jim from myself and Martine.

I have many fond memories of working together with Jim and the Chicago group.

Richard Teuscher

As I am based at CERN for the year, on sabbatical, I am unable to come to Chicago to meet with old friends and colleagues, and celebrate Jim's "emeritization"! I am of course forever in Jim's debt for giving me a wonderful start in particle physics, and teaching me the art of experimentation in high energy physics. I learned an enormous amount in my years at Chicago, and it has served me well in the decades since.

I wish Jim a long and productive emeritus phase of his career, and look forward to seeing him again in the near future, perhaps here at CERN. My best also to Carla and the rest of his family.

John Conway

I joined the Chicago OPAL group in 1991, directly from the salt mines of UA1. (Jim and I were able to swap Carlo Rubbia stories, which made me feel right at home.) I immediately started working on Jim's toy - the OPAL Barrel Presampler (others in the audience played with it too!) - and I quickly learned one thing: Jim is almost always right. Especially when you don't want him to be!

One example that comes to mind - perhaps "seared into my neurons" is a better description - is related to some repair work I was doing on one of the presampler digitizer boards. I had been trying to track down the problem with this particular board for several weeks when Jim showed up at CERN. After about 5 minutes in the lab with me, he suggested that the best way to solve the problem would be to unsolder most of the chips from the board and then systematically replace them, testing for functionality at each step. Now I have to admit that soldering is one of my least favorite electronics activities, and also one at which I am hopelessly clumsy. So I decided to ignore Jim's advice, choosing instead the "elegant" path of randomly probing signals from the board in the hope of miraculously stumbling upon the source of the problem.

After two weeks of waiting for this miracle to happen, I realized that Jim's strategy was probably not so painful after all. And of course, within a day of putting it into practice, I had found the problem and the board worked perfectly. After that I always listened very carefully to Jim's suggestions no matter how annoying they were!

In all seriousness though, Jim has been a role model for me since I met him. I regularly try to emulate his careful and systematic approach to physics problems and his light touch with collaborators. I am also deeply in his debt for all the support he has given to me, both while I was a member of his group and after I left Chicago. I look forward to continuing to work with (and learn from) Jim over the years to come. I don't expect that "retirement" will slow him down - nothing else ever has!

Hal Evans

The Eshop had a significant contribution to Jim's career. We were fortunate enough to build considerable hardware for each of three experiments.

The muon pair experiment contribution was a large array of drift chambers with all data collection. I remember that we had to use a huge amount of twisted pair cable to would move the data from the chamber amplifiers to the data collection processors. This cable had two main requirements. One requirement was to deliver the signals with no crosstalk and secondly supply stuffiest delay so that a trigger processor can make a decision. After everything was installed and the chambers tested with charged particles, Jim reported he discovered crosstalk. Lucky for me it wasn't the cable but some crosstalk in the chambers which were overcome by an emergency fix. The only other bug I remember was that the high power low voltage logic supplies could not be shut off with the mechanical swithes we installed. It turned out that the switches were arcing and welding closed by arcing. We fixed it and the experiment was run as Jim planned it. I was really impressed with how closely Jim stayed tuned in to all the details of this experiment.

The Opal chambers were unique. We never built chamber elements that required circuit boards that were over ten feet long and at least four feet wide. I think we needed over 64 of these boards. There were two major problems. No vendor made boards this size and the photoplots could not cover this large area. Both problems were solved. We located a vendor in Minneapolis and the artwork was generated with multiple overlapping glass panels. Jim enlisted a large group of students to drill feed through holes in these panels since the vendor had no tools to do any detail work on these big things. Jim delivered all these chambers to Cern and I never heard about these things again.

Atlas is an experiment of a much different character. The first issue was to decide on the detail architecture of the Tile-Cal. I remember an organizing meeting of at least a dozen institutions from all over the world. After about two days of discussion the attendees were interviewed sequentially to state their solution. Thanks to Jim we convinced the group that The University of Chicago should build the front end electronics and support the effort of another institution to include a calibration system and yet another institution, the data collection. The following year was used trying to meet the requirement. A breakthrough came when Jim convinced our colleagues that the digitizer should be separate from the analog front end. We finally delivered a superb solution on time. Jim deserves extra credit for his leadership in this effort and displaying great diplomacy with our partners.

Harold Sanders