Brice Rustad remained at Brookhaven before and after the experiment reversal

Brice Rustad remained at Brookhaven before and after the experiment reversal

• Jan 04, 2022
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The most important fact (for our purposes) about the career of Brice M. Rustad, Stan Ruby's collaborator on the disproven He⁶ recoil experiment, is that he afterward remained at Brookhaven Labs on assignment from Columbia for several years following the publication of the experiment. Later he transitioned to a staff position at Brookhaven, but continued within the sphere of Madame Wu's experimental group. 

Looking at his publications before and after the RR experiment, we find him as a coauthor with Wu and others in September 1952, immediately preceding his collaboration with Ruby. Then there are the two RR citations in 1953 and 1955. In September and October 1956, he was a coauthor on two beta spectrum studies on isotopes of argon. The first was with Arthur Schwarzchild as the lead author and also including C.S. Wu. The second paper on the Decay of A³⁵ was authored by Ottmar Kistner, Schwarzchild and Rustad. 

This paper was the necessary precursor to the A³⁵ paper by Herrmansfeld, Allen, et al. that first raised doubts for Wu about the RR experiment. 

Then in 1963, he and Joseph Vice performed a complete redo of the He6 recoil experiment by a different method, which came to an opposite conclusion from his publications with Ruby,

In 1961-62, he spent a year at the Riso nuclear research facility in Rothskilde, Denmark, working in the laboratory of Otto Kofoed-Hansen, who was one of the important contributors to beta decay work. Rustad collaborated with C.J. Christensen and A. Nielsen in Denmark, then return to Brookhaven in 1962. 

His final publication with the Danish group, on the half-life of the free neutron, appeared posthumously in 1965. A note in that paper reads: 

The experimenters and technicians associated with this work express their sorrow at the untimely death of Brice Rustad and offer their condolences to his wife, Mrs. Mary Rustad.

I'll write more in the next post about his life story.