Plaudits and Patents bestowed on LBL Scientific Staff in first half of 1992

Honors bestowed on members of the LBL scientific staff between mid-July and December 1992 include the following:

• Richard Diamond of the Nuclear Science Division is the recipient of the 1993 American Chemical Society Award for Nuclear Chemistry. Diamond was recognized for his "enormous contributions to the field of nuclear chemistry and related nuclear structure."

• John Clarke and Mark Bednarski--both Materials Sciences Division researchers and UC Berkeley professors--won awards in the Department of Energy's 1992 Materials Sciences Research Competition. The award to Clarke was for his high-temperature SQUID magnetometers. Bednarski, along with collaborator Matthew Callstrom of Ohio State University, received the award for work on the synthesis of carbohydrate-based polymers and their applications.

• Steven Derenzo of the Life Sciences Division received the 1992 Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Award for his contributions to photon detectors and instrumentation, including the discovery of new scintillators, and his work in high-resolution positron emission tomography.

Three of Research and Development magazine's R&D-100 awards for the year's top 100 achievements in technology went to LBL researchers. LBL winners included:

• An alkaline-fluoride-carbonate electrolyte for zinc/nickel oxide batteries, developed by Thomas Adler, Elton Cairns, and Frank McLarnon of the Energy and Environment Division;

• A DC broad-beam, high-current metal ion source developed by Accelerator and Fusion Research Division researcher Ian Brown and his team, including Robert MacGill, Michael Dickinson, and James Galvin of the Engineering Division;

• A raster scanner beam delivery system developed by Tim Renner of AFRD and William Chu and Bernhard Ludewigt of the Life Sciences Division; the team also included Krista Marks, Mark Nyman, R.P. Singh, and Ron Stradtner of the Engineering Division.

• Winner of Popular Science magazine's Grand Award for Science and Technology in 1992 was the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) research team headed by LBL's George Smoot, which detected slight variations in the temperature of the microwave background radiation that are believed to be the seeds of the structures in the universe.

Patents Awarded

Patents were recently awarded to the following LBL researchers:

• Edith Bourret-Courchesne for a method that provides for the controlled growth of semiconductors crystals;

• Shih-Ger (Ted) Chang and David Liu for a process for the removal of acid-forming gases from exhaust gases;

• Michael Green, Neville Cook, Thomas McEvilly, Ernest Major, and Paul Witherspoon for apparatus for the generation of seismic waves from a borehole;

• C. Judson King and Lisa Tung for a sorbing method for recovering carboxylic acid from aqueous streams;

• Carl Lampert and Steven Visco for an electrochromic optical switching device;

• David Liu for a method and apparatus for low-temperature photochemical vapor deposition of alloy and mixed metal oxide films;

• Victor Perez-Mendez, Selig Kaplan (and Robert Street) for amorphous silicon radiation detectors;

• Victor Perez-Mendez for a method and apparatus for improving particle detector spatial resolution;

• Donald Morris for a high-pressure oxygen furnace;

• Ross Schlueter (and Gary A. Deis) for a tunability enhanced electromagnetic wiggler for synchrotron radiation sources and free- electron lasers;

• Michael Siminovitch for a thermal element for maintaining minimum lamp wall temperature in fluorescent fixtures;

• Michael Siminovitch, Francis Rubinstein, and Richard Whitman for a heat transfer assembly for a fluorescent lamp and fixture;

• Bojan Turko (and George J. Yates) for a method for eliminating artifacts in charge-coupled device (CCD) imagers; and

• Steven Visco, Meilin Liu, and Lutgard DeJonghe for a metal- sulfur type cell for making secondary batteries.