Obituary
Thornton Murphy, a long-time physicist at Fermilab, ID 02125, died on Friday, October 12, at age 63 at his home in Batavia. A memorial service was held Monday, Oct. 15 at the Yurs-Peterson-Moss Funeral Home.
Thornton joined Fermilab in 1972. His recent work focused on a new beam line for future experiments. As a project leader, Thornton supervised the installation of equipment for the new beam line in an already existing tunnel. Scientists will use the new beam line to create test beams and send 120 GeV protons to the new CKM experiment. Thornton was involved in the beam line project since its design phase.
In the past, Thornton served as head of Fermilab's survey and alignment group and head of the Proton Laboratory. He was coordinator for the installation of the Tevatron accelerator and worked on several high-energy beam lines.
Thorton graduated from Western Reserve Academy in 1954. He completed his undergraduate studies at Princeton University. He earned his M.S. and Ph. D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Before coming to Fermilab, Thornton was a professor of physics at the University of Michigan and Carnegie Mellon University.
