Page 39 - Neutrons for Sciences and Society

2.1 Jules Horowitz (1921-1995)
He had a major role in the founding of the ILL31. After the failure of
the European project initiated by Kowarski, it was he who pressed the CEA to resume the venture as
a purely French initiative. Initially only Saclay engineers and physicists were involved, but these were quickly joined by teams from the CENG, leading to the preparation
of the presentation in Geneva, and Ageron and coworkers’ paper on the “high‐flux reactor and output beams”.
Fig. 2.1: Jules HOROWITZ at the ILL in 1995
Chapter 2: Portrait of three founders of the ILL
If Horowitz was not the principal author of this paper, he was the main motivator. In fact the whole design depended on a reactor aimed at producing neutron beams, and excluding use for irradiations. Horowitz had always been partisan to separating these two uses for neutrons, calling for different types of reactor. The ILL reactor followed this principle only having some irradiation facilities which do not interfere with the production of neutron beams. This characteristic, on the other hand, posed
a problem for the British during their discussions for joining the ILL; the British design attempted to take both functions into account on the same reactor.
31 This text is based on presentations made during the tributes to Horowitz in 1996, later published by the CEA in 1999 as “L’oeuvre de Jules Horowitz” by Lucile Arnaudet, Robert Deloche and Lucien Procope, and my per- sonal memories.
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