Terahertz Pioneer: Thomas G. Phillips “The Sky Above, the Mountain Below”

Thomas G. Phillips (1937–2022)

“…The SIS devices would reshape astronomy. They made their debut at OVRO, followed by CSO in Hawai'i, and overshadowed," wrote Peter Siegel, Phillips's collaborator on Herschel, editor-in-chief of the IEEE Journal of Microwaves, and a retired senior research scientist at JPL, which Caltech manages for NASA, in an essay called "Terahertz Pioneer: Thomas G. Phillips" [1]. (THz or terahertz is another term for submillimeter light and refers to frequencies rather than wavelengths.)…”

Terahertz Pioneer: Paul F. Goldsmith “New Eyes for THz Astronomers”

“…By this time the system noise was down to 9000 K double sideband, and they had a 50-channel filter bank on loan from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Although this was not the first observation of the transition of CO in interstellar space (Goldsmith was scooped by Tom Phillips, who was working with Keith Jefferts and Peter Wannier at Kitt Peak using an InSb mixer [16], [17], to make the first CO measurements in July 1973), it led to a popular thesis. Before finishing up at UC Berkeley, Goldsmith and Plambeck got the receiver noise down to a record 6000 K double sideband (approaching the best fundamental mixer performance of the day) [18].…”

“…The Herschel Space Observatory [104] was in the instrument build phase, and there were many more anticipated submillimeter-wave instrument programs in the European and US space mission queues. The Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) [105] was also in the last stages of planning before beginning telescope construction, and there were other major ground-based millimeter and submillimeter wave observatory proposals getting visibility.…”

“…The Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) [105] was also in the last stages of planning before beginning telescope construction, and there were other major ground-based millimeter and submillimeter wave observatory proposals getting visibility. There was also a significant millimeter-wave astronomy community at nearby California Institute of Technology, where submillimeter astronomers Tom Phillips [104], Anneila Sargent, Nick Scoville, John Carpenter, and Dariusz Lis, among others, were working.…”

Terahertz Pioneer: Robert J. Mattauch “Two Terminals Will Suffice”

“…In his last major technical role, Mattauch, and Ph.D. student, Arthur Lichtenberger, joined Tony Kerr (now back at NRAO), noted superconducting device theorist Marc Feldman (then at UVa), mixer designer Shing-Kuo Pan, and others in Charlottesville, to expand the receiver element work to include the new superconducting-insulating-superconducting (SIS) devices [66] that had largely replaced Schottky barrier diode receivers in most astronomical observatories by this time [67]- [71]. The SIS device work that Mattauch started up at UVa, continues to this day, through Lichtenberger, as NRAO focuses on delivering a large number of receivers for the telescopes comprising ALMA [72], [73].…”