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I am Bobbie Joyner. I served as the physics undergraduate secretary/ student advisor back in the 70's.
He was the best boss I ever had, and I retired from Cal in 2010. He mentored me and I modeled my career supervising employees and students after his character and values. I went on to work for the Haas School and Stdent Affairs but never found a greater role model as pro Kerth.
~Roberta Joyner
Roy Kerth's E&M and his 1954 charged kaon beamline at the Bevatron
I took Roy Kerth's junior-level E&M in 1978 or 1979. At the time, I was used to a more theoretical approach, and it took me some time to appreciate his very hands-on, intuitive E&M style... in retrospect, I prefer his style... his class remains memorable some 40 years later.
Recently I stumbled on descriptions of the secondary charged kaon beam he and Donald H. Stork (later on the UCLA faculty) designed in about 1954 for the Bevatron, which used what we now call "strong focusing".
Some beautiful charged-kaon experiments resulted from what was called then the "Kerth-Stork" magnets. A similar arrangement was used to discover the antiproton, where there was a priority dispute over the magnet design... a UC San Diego physicist named Oreste Piccioni felt that he contributed that magnet design, and sued in 1972 for a share of the Nobel Prize awarded to Segre and Chamberlain.
Actually, Bruce Cork and Emery Zajec had already constructed and deployed strong focusing magnets for a secondary beam at the old 60" cyclotron at the Crocker Lab on campus, by April 1953 (UCRL-2182), only 8 months after the idea of strong focusing was first published by Courant, Livingston, and Snyder. Cork went on to use those magnets on the Bevatron injection system in July, 1954 (UCRL-2385).
The preliminary charged kaon results using the Kerth-Stork strong focusing magnets were reported in early Dec. 1954 (UCRL-2805), prior to the APS meeting in the last week of Dec. 1954, at which Piccioni says he designed the antiproton discovery experiment for Segre and Chamberlain. Nearly final results from the Kerth-Stork arrangement were published in May 1955.
Probably everyone's memories have been clouded by 1972 when Piccioni sued... these days, a few minutes with Google finds everything.
~Harry Nelson