Milestone-Proposal talk:Heavy Ion Accelerator Facility, 1973

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Advocates and reviewers will post their comments below. In addition, any IEEE member can sign in with their ETHW login (different from IEEE Single Sign On) and comment on the milestone proposal's accuracy or completeness as a form of public review.

-- Administrator4 (talk) 12:48, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

Advocates’ Checklist

  1. Is proposal for an achievement rather than for a person?
  2. Was proposed achievement a significant advance rather than an incremental improvement to an existing technology?
  3. Were there prior or contemporary achievements of a similar nature?
  4. Has the achievement truly led to a functioning, useful, or marketable technology?
  5. Is proposal adequately supported by significant references (minimum of five) such as patents, contemporary newspaper articles, journal articles, or citations to pages in scholarly books? At least one of the references from a peer-reviewed scholarly book or journal article. The full text of the material, not just the references, shall be present. If the supporting texts are copyright-encumbered and cannot be posted on the ETHW for intellectual property reasons, the proposers shall email a copy to the History Center so that it can be forwarded to the advocate. If the advocate does not consider the supporting references sufficient, the advocate may ask the proposer(s) for additional ones.
  6. Are the scholarly references sufficiently recent?
  7. Is proposed citation readable and understandable by the general public?
  8. Does the proposed plaque site fulfill the requirements? Is the address complete? Are the GPS coordinates correct and in decimal format?
  9. Is the proposal quality comparable to that of IEEE publications?
  10. Scientific and technical units correct? (e.g. km, mm, hertz, etc.) Are acronyms correct and properly upperercased or lowercased?
  11. Date formats correct as specified in Section 6 of Milestones Program Guidelines? https://ieeemilestones.ethw.org/Helpful_Hints_on_Citations,_Plaque_Locations

Reviewers’ Checklist

  1. Is suggested wording of the Plaque Citation accurate?
  2. Is evidence presented in the proposal of sufficient substance and accuracy to support the Plaque Citation?
  3. Does proposed milestone represent a significant technical achievement?
  4. Were there similar or competing achievements? If so, have the proposers adequately described these and their relationship to the achievement being proposed?


In answering the questions above, the History Committee asks that reviewers apply a similar level of rigor to that used to peer-review an article, or evaluate a research proposal. Some elaboration is desirable. Of course the Committee would welcome any additional observations that you may have regarding this proposal.

Submission and Approval Log

Submitted date: 20 February 2024
Advocate approval date: 16 July 2024
History Committee approval date:
Board of Directors approval date:

Original Citation Title and Text -- Administrator4 (talk) 17:13, 3 April 2024 (UTC)

Heavy Ion Accelerator Facility, 1973

The 14UD is one of the premier highest voltage electrostatic accelerators operating in the world. It has pioneered research in the areas of Nuclear spectroscopy and structure, Fission and fusion studies, Transient fields and hyperfine interactions and Accelerator mass spectrometry using the 15 million volt tandem electrostatic accelerator with an additional 6 million volt linear accelerator loop, contributing to fields in climate change, biomedicine, astrophysics, and environmental monitoring of discharge from nuclear reprocessing plants.

Expert Reviewer: Wolfram Fischer -- Ambarishnatu (talk) 03:58, 16 July 2024 (UTC)

Expert Reviewer: Wolfram Fischer

1. Is the suggested wording of the Plaque Citation accurate? Yes
2. Is evidence presented in the proposal of sufficient substance and accuracy to support the Plaque Citation? Yes
3. Does the proposed milestone represent a significant technical achievement? Yes
4. Were there similar or competing achievements? Yes
If so, have the proposers adequately described these and their relationship to the achievement being proposed? Yes, and Wolfram provided some additional verbiage for the What features set this work apart from similar achievements section

Bio: Wolfram Fischer has worked with proton and heavy ion accelerators for more than 30 years. He is now Deputy Associate Laboratory Director for Accelerators in Nuclear and Particle Physics at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, USA. He is also Chair of the Collider-Accelerator Department which operates the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a hadron injector complex that is also used for isotope production and space radiation studies. The two Tandem Van De Graaff accelerators are similar to the HIAF machine. In 2022, Wolfram gave an invited talk “Present accelerators (non-LHC) and approved facilities” at the International Conference on High Energy Physics ICHEP2022. That year he also had an invited talk “Present and future accelerators for nuclear physics” at the European Nuclear Physics Conference EuNPC2022. In 2024 he was the Scientific Program Chair for the International Particle Accelerator Conference IPAC’24. He is presently Chair of the Particle Accelerator Science and Technology (PAST) Technical Committee in the IEEE Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society (NPSS).

Expert Reviewer : Dr Filip G. Kondev -- Ambarishnatu (talk) 20:39, 16 July 2024 (UTC)

Expert Reviewer: Dr Filip G. Kondev

1. Is suggested wording of the Plaque Citation accurate?

Yes, I found the Plaque Citation to be accurate and to capture the main advances of the Heavy Ion Accelerator Facility (HIAF).

2. Is evidence presented in the proposal of sufficient substance and accuracy to support the Plaque Citation?

Yes. The evidence describes the unique statue of HIAF in advancing nuclear science and nuclear applications in Australia and in the world. I found it impressive that many of the experiments and detectors have been designed and built in-house by local research staff and precision engineers.

3. Does the proposed milestone represent a significant technical achievement?

Yes. HIAF is one of the Australian National University’s largest pieces of research infrastructure and is unique in Australia and the region. It supports Australia’s only experimental nuclear physics research and teaching program, as well as a broad spectrum of other research. This includes investigating of climate and environmental changes, nuclear medicine, optimizing resource and energy exploitation, and astrophysics.

4. Were there similar or competing achievements? If so, have the proposers adequately described these and their relationship to the achievement being proposed?

It is my opinion that the proposers did an excellent job in outlining the unique features of HIAF compared to other similar achievements that include low-energy particle accelerators.


Bio: I am a nuclear physicist with approximately 38 years of experience in the fields of experimental nuclear physics and nuclear data. Currently, I hold the title of Principal Physicist in the Physics Division of Argonne National Laboratory, Lemont, USA where I am the Principal Investigator (PI) for the Argonne Nuclear Data Program. I serve as a member of the national Coordinating Committee of the U.S. Nuclear Data Program of the Office of Nuclear Physics, Office of Science, U.S. Department of Energy. I am also PI of several multi-million dollars grants from the U.S. Department of Energy in the areas of experimental nuclear structure physics and nuclear data. I have published over seven hundred papers in major, peer-reviewed scientific journals and conference proceedings, and other scientists have cited these publications significantly. I have been invited speaker at many domestic and international scientific conferences where I have presented more than eighty talks. I am a regular provider of scientific reviews for top physics journals such as Physical Review Letters, Physics Letters B, Nuclear Physics A, European Physical Journal A, Nuclear Data Sheets, Applied Radiation and Isotopes, Nuclear Instruments and Methods, Journal of Physics G, Physical Review C and Review of Scientific Instruments. On numerous occasions, I have served on expert panels evaluating scientific proposals for the U.S. Department of Energy, including the Office of Science and the Office of Nuclear Energy, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Department of Air Force and the UK Science and Technology Facility Council. I was a member of the Program Advisory Committee of the LANSCE accelerator facility at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, USA. I have also been appointed to several committees that have convened on numerous occasions to provide technical advice and support to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Vienna, Austria. I am a scientific user of the major accelerator nuclear physics facilities in the world, including Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB, USA) at Michigan State University, Argonne Tandem Linac Accelerator System (ATLAS, USA) at Argonne National Laboratory, Rare Isotope Beams Facility (RIBF, Japan) at RIKEN, and the UNILAC, FRS and ESR accelerator facilities at GSI (Germany), as well as of other smaller-scale accelerator facilities in US, Europe, Japan and Australia.

Advocate Approval of this Proposal -- Bberg (talk) 13:21, 25 July 2024 (UTC)

I was privileged to work on this proposal, including helping to find Expert Reviewers, and to suggest improvements to the citation and the formatting of the support information. I approve this proposal, but I certainly welcome comments about improvements.

Brian Berg: IEEE History Committee Vice Chair & Milestones Subcommittee Chair