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The spark of the Super: Teller–Ulam and the birth of the H-bomb—rivalry, credit, and legacy at 75 years
In early 1951, Los Alamos scientists Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam devised a breakthrough that would lead to the hydrogen bomb [1]. Their design gave the United States an initial advantage in the Cold War, though comparable progress was soon achieved independently in the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom.
Rashmi C. Desai, Mark Nelkin
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 24 | Number 2 | February 1966 | Pages 142-152
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE66-A18299
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The time-dependent moments equations derived from the linearized Boltzmann equation are solved for the case of an infinite nonabsorbing medium of hard spheres. The distribution function at zero time is chosen to be Maxwellian at origin and zero elsewhere. The solutions can be applied to neutron diffusion in monatomic hydrogen and to the motion of atoms in a dilute monatomic gas. In the latter case, the solutions give the spatial moments of Van Hove's self-correlation function Gs(,t). Non-Gaussian corrections to Gs(, t) are studied. It is found that these corrections are very sensitive to the type of anisotropy of the scattering kernel. Various approximations (including synthetic kernel) of the exact kernel for a hard sphere gas are considered. The non-Gaussian corrections obtained from approximate kernels are compared with those obtained from the exact kernel. In particular, a recently published kinetic model calculation, using a separable isotropic kernel with l/v scattering cross section, overestimates the non-Gaussian corrections by a factor of almost 4.