Klaus Halbach

Klaus Halbach (1925 to 2000) was a German-born American applied physicist, engineer and inventor who spent his career as a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Born in Wuppertal, he earned a doctorate in nuclear physics at the University of Basel in 1954, worked at Fribourg and Stanford, and joined the Berkeley fusion research group in 1960. He contributed to the design of the Omnitron synchrotron that underlay the Bevalac and to magnet systems such as wigglers and undulators, and with Ron Holsinger developed the POISSON magnet simulation package. In the late 1970s he proposed a permanent magnet arrangement for producing multipole fields, now called the Halbach array and widely used in motors and MRI machines.