Celebrating the Life of Noboru Watanabe

抄録

I trace Noboru Watanabe’s career from my first knowledge of the Neutron Sputnik diffractometer that he and Motoharu Kimura built at the Tohoku electron linac neutron source in the late 1960s. Starting in 1968, Argonne scientists conceived a pulsed spallation neutron source called ZING. In 1973, Kimura and Watanabe came to Argonne (ANL) to assist in the design of a prototype, ZING-P, with simple neutron scattering instruments, which was completed in early 1974 and proved out the principles of the new technologies. An improved prototype, ZING-P’, followed, which operated until 1979. Kimura and Watanabe returned to Japan, where they promoted a pulsed spallation neutron source called KENS at KEK, which Noboru Watanabe completed in 1980, with Yoshikazu Ishikawa in the lead. Argonne workers completed IPNS in 1981, and intense collaborations continued between KEK and Argonne. In 1977, four by-then-involved laboratories formed the International Collaboration on Advanced Neutron Sources, ICANS, including ANL, KEK, LANL, and Rutherford Laboratory (in the UK). Watanabe led the science program at KENS and took prominent roles in ICANS meetings including ICANS-XXI at Tokai-mura in 2014. Watanabe also served on advisory committees of almost all of the spallation source projects formed over the years.