Jack Gaffey
Jack Gaffey | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1944 Washington, D.C., United States |
| Died | November 29, 2022 (aged 77–78) Rockville, Maryland, United States |
| Residence | Kensington, MD, United States |
| Nationality | USA |
| Alma mater | University of California, Riverside; University of California, San Diego |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Plasma physics, space physics, mathematics |
Jack Gaffey (John Dean Gaffey, Jr.; 1944 – 29 November 2022) was an American plasma physicist based in Kensington, Maryland. He worked on the theory of magnetized plasmas, wave–particle interactions and resonance phenomena in the magnetosphere and in fusion devices, and helped establish plasma physics teaching and research in southern Brazil.
Biography
Gaffey was born in Washington, D.C. on 27 June 1944. He took his bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics with high honors at the University of California, Riverside in 1966, followed by a master's degree in 1968 and a Ph.D. in plasma physics in 1974, both at the University of California, San Diego. He then held a postdoctoral position at the University of Maryland.
In 1975 he was invited to found a plasma physics group as a visiting professor at the Instituto de Física of the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where he helped start master's and doctoral programs in plasma physics. He returned to the United States in 1980, settling first in Alexandria, Virginia, and moving to Kensington, Maryland in 1984.
In the United States he worked as a research associate at the Naval Research Laboratory and later at the University of Maryland and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, and taught mathematics at Southeastern University in Washington, D.C.
Outside of science, Gaffey was a long-time member and later board member of the Kensington Historical Society and chairperson of the Kensington Ethics Committee. He attended the town council meetings of Kensington regularly and closed them with a short report on what was happening in the night sky. He died on 29 November 2022 in Rockville, Maryland.
Scientific contributions
Gaffey's research was in theoretical plasma physics and its application to space and laboratory plasmas, and he was an author of some 89 publications. His work of the 1970s included studies of the dispersion relation for the Bernstein mode in a two-component electron plasma, identifying solutions corresponding to the upper hybrid resonance in the magnetosphere, and analyses of energetic ion distributions produced by neutral beam injection in tokamaks. He also examined the instability of the ordinary electromagnetic mode propagating perpendicular to an external magnetic field in counter-streaming plasmas with anisotropic temperatures, deriving conditions for the instability and calculating its growth rate.
Selected publications
- Gaffey, J. D., and LaQuey, R. E., "Upper hybrid resonance in the magnetosphere", Journal of Geophysical Research, vol. 81, no. 4 (1976), p. 595.
- Gaffey, J. D., "Energetic ion distribution resulting from neutral beam injection in tokamaks", Journal of Plasma Physics (1976).