Francis Farley

Francis James Macdonald Farley FRS^[1] is a British scientist. Fellow of the Institute of Physics and an honorary fellow of Trinity College Dublin

During World War II he designed and made the first X-band microwave radar with 100 ns pulse and a one degree beam which directed the 15" guns at Dover.^[2] It showed shells splashing around the target. He invented clutter reference Doppler radar which could see vehicles on land and was used in Italy.^[3] As a senior lecturer in Auckland University he was a NZ delegate to the 1955 UN conference in Geneva on "Atomic energy for peaceful purposes". During a year at Harwell in1955 he measured the neutron yield from plutonium fission as a function of the incident neutron epithermal energy. From 1957 at CERN he measured the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon in three successive experiments, inventing the muon storage ring.^[4][5] Accurate tests of special relativity at CERN. He participated in the follow up measurement at Brookhaven National Laboratory ^[6]

He has worked on wave energy since 1976 and has filed 14 patents in this area. He is the co-inventor of the Anaconda wave energy device.^[7]

He won the 1980 Hughes Medal of the Royal Society "for his ultra-precise measurements of the muon magnetic moment, a severe test of quantum electrodynamics and of the nature of the muon".^[8]

1967-82 he was the academic head of the Royal Military College of Science, Shrivenham GB. He has been visiting professor at Yale, Reading University (of engineering), University of New South Wales (of theoretical physics) and currently at Southampton.

Moving to France in 1986 he helped the cancer hospital Centre Antoine Lacassagne in Nice to instal a 65 MeV cyclotron for proton therapy.^[9] He designed the beam transport which brings the beam to the patient. Operating unmodified for 23 years the system has treated over 3000 patients for ocular melanoma with a cure rate of 95% .

His publications include the Methuen monograph "Elements of Pulse Circuits" (1955) ^[10] translated into French and Spanish and papers on particle physics, relativity, wave energy and cosmology.

In 2012 he wrote a romantic novel, Catalysed Fusion, which illustrates life around the accelerators at CERN and in Geneva ^[11]

References