Louis Slotin

Louis Alexander Slotin (1 December 1910 – 30 May 1946) was a Canadian physicist and chemist who took part in the Manhattan Project.

Slotin received a B.Sc. degree in geology from the university in 1932 and a M.Sc. degree in 1933.

With the assistance of one of his mentors, he obtained a fellowship to study at King's College London under the supervision of Arthur John Allmand, the chair of the chemistry department, who specialized in the field of applied electrochemistry and photochemistry.

While at King's College London, Slotin distinguished himself as an amateur boxer by winning the college's amateur bantamweight boxing championship.

Later, he gave the impression that he had fought for the Spanish Republic and trained to fly a fighter with the Royal Air Force.

Author Robert Jungk recounted in his book Brighter than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists, the first published account of the Manhattan Project, that Slotin "had volunteered for service in the Spanish Civil War, more for the sake of the thrill of it than on political grounds. He had often been in extreme danger as an anti-aircraft gunner."

During an interview years later, Sam stated that his brother had gone "on a walking tour in Spain" and he "did not take part in the war" as previously thought.

Born and raised in the North End of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Slotin earned both his Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees from the University of Manitoba, before obtaining his doctorate in physical chemistry at King's College London in 1936.

Afterwards, he joined the University of Chicago as a research associate to help design a cyclotron.

Slotin earned a Ph.D. degree in physical chemistry from King's College London in 1936.

He won a prize for his thesis entitled "An Investigation into the Intermediate Formation of Unstable Molecules During some Chemical Reactions."

Afterwards, he spent six months working as a special investigator for Dublin's Great Southern Railways, testing the Drumm nickel-zinc rechargeable batteries used on the Dublin–Bray line.

In 1937, after he unsuccessfully applied for a job with Canada's National Research Council, the University of Chicago accepted Slotin as a research associate.

There, he gained his first experience with nuclear chemistry, helping to build the first cyclotron in the midwestern United States.

The job paid poorly and Slotin's father had to support him for two years.

From 1939 to 1940, Slotin collaborated with Earl Evans, the head of the university's biochemistry department, to produce radiocarbon (carbon-14 and carbon-11) from the cyclotron.

While working together, the two men also used carbon11 to demonstrate that plant cells had the capacity to use carbon dioxide for carbohydrate synthesis, through carbon fixation.

In 1942, Slotin was invited to participate in the Manhattan Project, and subsequently performed experiments with uranium and plutonium cores to determine their critical mass values.

After World War II he continued his research at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

Slotin might have been present at the start-up of Enrico Fermi's "Chicago Pile-1", the first nuclear reactor, on 2 December 1942; the accounts of the event do not agree on this point.

During this time, he also contributed to several papers in the field of radiobiology.

His expertise on the subject garnered the attention of the United States government, and as a result he was invited to join the Manhattan Project, an effort to develop an atomic bomb.

Slotin worked on the production of plutonium under future Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner at the university and later at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

He moved to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico in December 1944 to work in the bomb physics group of Robert Bacher.

At Los Alamos, Slotin's duties consisted of dangerous criticality testing, first with uranium in Otto Robert Frisch's experiments, and later with plutonium cores.

Criticality testing involved bringing masses of fissile materials to near-critical levels to establish their critical mass values.

Scientists referred to this flirting with the possibility of a nuclear chain reaction as "tickling the dragon's tail", based on a remark by physicist Richard Feynman, who compared the experiments to "tickling the tail of a sleeping dragon".

On 16 July 1945, Slotin assembled the core for Trinity, the first detonated atomic device, and became known as the "chief armorer of the United States" for his expertise in assembling nuclear weapons.

On 21 May 1946, he accidentally began a fission reaction which released a burst of hard radiation.

He was rushed to the hospital and died nine days later on 30 May.

Slotin had become the victim of the second criticality accident in history following Harry Daghlian, who had been fatally exposed to radiation by the same plutonium "demon core" that killed Slotin.

Slotin was hailed as a hero by the United States government for reacting quickly enough to prevent the deaths of his colleagues.

However, some physicists argue that Slotin's behavior preceding the accident was reckless and that his death was preventable.

The accident and its aftermath have been dramatized in several fictional and non-fiction accounts.

Louis Slotin was the first of three children born to Israel and Sonia Slotin, Yiddish-speaking Jewish refugees who had fled the pogroms of Russia to Winnipeg, Manitoba.

He grew up in the North End neighborhood of Winnipeg, an area with a large concentration of Eastern European immigrants.

From his early days at Machray Elementary School through his teenage years at St. John's High School, Slotin was academically exceptional.

His younger brother, Sam, later remarked that his brother "had an extreme intensity that enabled him to study long hours."

At age 16, Slotin entered the University of Manitoba to pursue a degree in science.

During his undergraduate years, he received a University Gold Medal in both physics and chemistry.