Harold R Kaufman

Excerpted from:
http://www.svc.org/H/H_Kaufman.html

Harold R. Kaufman is an American physicist, noted for his development of ion thrusters for NASA during the 1950's and 60's. Kaufman developed a version of the duoplasmatron for the purpose of spacecraft propulsion. ...

RS: Here we are at the 47th Annual Society of Vacuum Coaters Technical Conference in Dallas, Texas, and we have the honor of being with Dr. Harold Kaufman, one of the pioneers in the field of ion beam-assisted tools. We were hoping to get a feel from him on some of the contributions that this major development in the field has helped the rest of us get our jobs done.

RS: How did you acquire this Von Ardenne source? Was it electron based?

HK: It worked on the same principles as the electron bombardment source I worked on, but it was a single-aperture source. If you know anything about accelerating charged particles, you know you get very low currents out of a single aperture. But if you want enough current to be suitable for thrust to propel a spacecraft, you need less voltage and more current. You need to match it with the requirement. The electrons were emitted from a hot filament; they bombarded neutral atoms or molecules; the electrons were constrained by a magnetic field; and then they were electrostatically accelerated. All those parts were the same—just all the wrong proportions.

What I was able to do was to generate a large beam that could give significant thrust. That was in 1959 or 1960. Along about 1970, people became interested in modifying films with ion beams, so I had a head start on designing the sources that were needed for that sort of application.
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RS: The original invention focused on space travel. Did you ever get to try any of these on actual spacecraft?

HK: There was a test flight in 1964, and there was another in 1970. But this is one of those fields where things move slowly. The first application did not occur until 1997. So, you can see that there was some slow motion there. I was involved in 10 or 20 mission calculations and program proposals and such. That’s one of the reasons I got interested in thin films because it was something I could do right away instead of waiting for 10 or 20 years.
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RS: The time constant was much faster then. How did you transition from the NASA thruster approach to this ion source? Did people approach you or did you think that you might have something that could be applicable to the field?

HK: Well, a couple of people approached me. Jerry Cuomo thought it would be interesting to use these ion sources on some of the work he was doing at IBM Yorktown. He invited me to come out there for several weeks each summer. By then, I had retired from NASA, and I was working at Colorado State University.

For the first 8 or 10 weeks, I averaged one patent disclosure per week of employment. I got my post-graduate education in patents from Jerry. He was quite good at that. He taught me one of the fundamental things: If something goes horribly bad in the laboratory, you should say, “Now what can that be a real opportunity for?” You turn it around and look for a patent.

RS: Prudent advice. As you worked with these early films, what was the application that you were trying to engineer or accomplish?

HK: The early films were all really things that Jerry had been interested in. I was not a prime mover in any of the films. I worked with Jerry and with Jim Harper also, and later Steve Rossnagel—all at IBM Yorktown. Typically, they would present the problem, and we’d work together solving it. I sort of approached the films in a general way. I would come into contact with a lot of problems, and I would try to generate a few general concepts to deal with them, rather than looking at specific ones only.

RS: Did IBM allow you to practice your art in other areas or was it exclusively arranged?

HK: No. It was not exclusive. It was very generous in that we would have a patent, and IBM and I would have equal rights to the patent, which was very nice. This would help build up the patent portfolio. Very generous, and it’s easy to be productive under those conditions.
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RS: What do you think is one of the major accomplishments as you look around the industry and see where all of your sources are implemented? What makes you proud of some of the different devices you have developed?

HK: Oh that’s a difficult question. You must realize that a lot of us work in technology because we enjoy it. It’s a nice way to make a living. We get caught up in the pursuit. I’m not a hunter, but I suspect that looking for new knowledge must have some of the same thrill as going out and hunting for a wild animal. You get caught up in that and you don’t worry too much about some of the other things. I try to take an overall look. What I get out of the overall look is that in technology, we are a subculture of the overall whole culture we live in.

A couple of years ago I visited Mesa Verde. That made a deep impression on me. There were stone houses. People lived there in relatively secluded areas and were able to sustain their culture from about 600 A.D. to 1200 A.D. Except for little changes, like maybe some human sacrifice at the end, the culture was essentially static. 600 years. It only took us 300 years to go from Sir Isaac Newton to landing on the Moon. Something has changed in the last few hundred years so that we’ve become a very active society, technically moving ahead. Still the people who are doing it are a small fraction, maybe 1% of the total culture. I guess what impresses me more is not my particular contribution to it but rather that I am part of a subculture that is moving ahead our overall culture at a terribly fast rate compared to anything previous in history.
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RS: As you mentioned the future, where do you think that this technology will go? Do you foresee more use for interplanetary emissions for these thrusters? Do you see ion-assist low-voltage new devices for physical control of nanostructures?

HK: I think both of those. We are planning at present for interplanetary missions. We’re looking at all types of thrusters. That seems to be moving ahead. That one is surprising how slow it is. We landed on the Moon 35 years ago, and we never went back to it. But we do seem to be moving ahead on some of the plans to go to other planets.

I see partly the end product changing. We’re obviously going to have “smart” machines in almost everything we touch. There will be computers embedded in everything. The ion sources will increase their use. They’ve generally been competing with plasma processing. If you can do it with plasma processing, it’s probably cheaper than having a separate ion source. But the ion sources are coming down in price; they’re becoming more useful and more practical. I think that they will continue to expand in use. So will a lot of other things.

In the ion source field, it seems like we add new ion sources, new concepts, all of the time; but we don’t drop many of the old ones. The whole field becomes more complex.

RS: And broader. We’re going to conclude at this point, so if there is anything else that you would like to mention for posterity . . .

HK: Well, I’ve enjoyed this meeting, and I have particularly enjoyed the tutorial seminars. Don Mattox looking back on some of the technical developments was very interesting. Charlie Bishop’s talk was fascinating too. He’s looking at transition. Our profit model for the past is going to disappear. We’re going to have to live more as a commodity rather than high-tech where we can charge very high prices. That’s part of a change that’s occurring. We’ll keep seeing more of those changes too. We seem to be becoming more competitive and the rate of technological development doesn’t seem to be slowing at all yet.