Charles Critchfield

Charles Critchfield
Critchfield's Los Alamos ID badge photo
Born	June 7, 1910 Shreve, Ohio
Died	February 12, 1994 (aged 84) Los Alamos, New Mexico
Citizenship	American
Nationality	American
Fields	Mathematical Physics
Institutions	Institute for Advanced Study Harvard University Carnegie Institution Los Alamos National Laboratory University of Minnesota
Alma mater	George Washington University
Doctoral advisor	Edward Teller
Doctoral students	William C. Erickson Sophie Oleksa
Known for	Nuclear weapons Manhattan Project Balloon technology
Influences	George Gamow John von Neumann

Charles Louis Critchfield (June 7, 1910 – February 12, 1994) was an American mathematical physicist. A graduate of George Washington University, where he earned his PhD in Physics under the direction of Edward Teller in 1939, he conducted research in ballistics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the Ballistic Research Laboratory at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, and received three patents for improved sabot designs.

In 1943, Teller and Robert Oppenheimer persuaded Critchfield to come to the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he joined the Ordnance Division under Captain William Parsons on the gun-type fission weapons, Little Boy and Thin Man. After it was discovered that the Thin Man design would not work, he was transferred to Robert Bacher's Gadget Division as the leader of the Initiator group, which was responsible for the design and testing of the "Urchin" neutron initiator that provided the burst of neutrons that kick-started the nuclear detonation of the Fat Man weapon.

After the war he became a professor at the University of Minnesota, and then vice president for research at the Convair division of General Dynamics, where he worked on the Atlas family of rockets. In 1961, J. Carson Mark and Norris Bradbury offered him a position at Los Alamos, which he held until he retired in 1977.