“Laser and Audio Pioneer”

Alan Eugene Hill, a 56-year resident of Albuquerque, NM, died on Memorial Day 2023, after a long battle with Parkinson’s. He was 83. Alan was preceded in death by his father, Glenn, and his mother, Minnie. He is survived by his wife of 63 years, Carol Hill of Albuquerque, NM; his son Larry Hill and wife Andrea of Los Alamos, NM; granddaughter Rachel (Hill) Moore and husband Dalton Moore and great-grandchildren Elliott and Maeryn of Faribault, MN; grandson Daniel Hill of Vancouver, BC, Canada; son Roy Hill and wife Loli and grandson Kyle Hill of Colorado Springs, CO. He will be laid to rest at the Guaje Pines Cemetery in Los Alamos, NM.

A memorial service will be held on Saturday August 5, 2023, from 1 to 3 pm, at Heights Cumberland Presbyterian Church in Albuquerque, NM (8600 Academy Rd, NE). A reception will follow. In lieu of flowers, the family invites donations to The Parkinson’s Foundation and the Cave Research Foundation.

Alan was born in Durango, CO. His father, Glenn, was a traveling salesman; his mother, Minnie, was a primary school teacher. After WWII started, Glenn got a job working at the Convair plant in San Diego, CA, where Alan grew up.

From an early age, Alan had a keen interest in science that seemed out of place in his family of origin. As a toddler, he would stick his fingers in electrical sockets because he was amazed that anything could deliver such a sensation. He would cry and repeat. Thus began his life-long obsession with electricity and electrical devices.

Beginning in grade school, Alan’s small bedroom became piled high with electronic equipment. He became a ham radio operator and learned Morse code. In high school, Alan was the first person in San Diego to receive Sputnik’s signal. This made the local papers, thus prompting his classmates to address him with a “beep beep beep” as they passed him in the halls. Alan was the singular charming and enthusiastic science nerd at Sweetwater High School in National City.

Alan enthusiastically competed in Science Fairs, and as a high school senior placed second in the 1957 national competition. While science was first and foremost, he developed a few other substantial interests. Alan played trombone in the Bonham Brothers band, and marched in the Rose Parade on at least two occasions. He roller-skated competitively, becoming accomplished in freestyle. While his skating career lasted only a few years, it was highly significant because he met his future wife, Carol, at Skateland in downtown San Diego.

Also during high school, Alan contracted nephritis, and spent some time at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. This experience was first significant because a generous number of girls, thinking they’d never see him again, came to the airport to kiss him goodbye. It was formative because the doctors predicted he would not live past age 35. This expectation really lit a fire under him. He resolved to accomplish as much as he could in the time he had left. Ultimately his kidney function stabilized at a marginally-reduced level. On this and many other occasions, Alan beat the odds. He liked cats, and like a cat he seemed to have nine lives.

The University of Michigan sponsored a campus trip for all the National Science Fair winners. Alan was particularly impressed by the cyclotron, and generally decided that this was the place for him. He entered Michigan in 1958, studying physics. Girlfriend Carol attended Berkeley, studying nursing. After one year, Carol transferred to Michigan to be near Alan. The next year, 1960, Alan and Carol were married in San Diego over Spring Break. Their honeymoon comprised the drive back to Ann Arbor. They stopped at the Grand Canyon and Mammoth Cave, both of which would play a big part in their later lives.

In his third year at Michigan, Alan took a general physics course from professor Peter Franken. After class one day, Alan approached Peter and showed him one of the magnetically-crushed aluminum pipes from his senior science fair experiment, saying “What do you think caused this?” Peter couldn’t guess, and at the end of that conversation he said, “How would you like a job this summer?” Thus, in the summer of 1961, Alan stayed in Ann Arbor to work for Peter, instead of going back home to San Diego to work for General Atomic, as he’d done the previous several summers.

The theme of his summer project was a seemingly far-fetched idea of Peter’s that he called “optical harmonics.” It took about three weeks for Alan to construct and perform the experiment, using a ruby laser borrowed from Prof. Wilber Peters. The result was published in Physical Review Letters before summer’s end, and a new sub-field of physics was born.

Alan graduated with a bachelor’s degree in physics in Spring 1963. To celebrate, Alan and his family (Carol, young son Larry, and Alan’s parents) took a driving trip to again see Mammoth and also nearby caves. While camping out, they blocked the path of some cavers. A conversation ensued, and Alan was invited to take a trip that very day—which he did. It was a 16-hour trip that was both exhausting and harrowing. He resolved never to do it again.

Fate intervened. Soon after, Carol inadvertently found a book called The Caves Beyond, written by two of the Mammoth cavers, in the Ann Arbor library. Alan became enthused, which for him always precipitated technical ideas. He developed a “cave radio” to communicate underground, and brought it to the Thanksgiving 1963 Mammoth cave expedition. There Carol had her first caving trip, and from then on both were hooked.

Alan continued his education at Michigan, earning a Master’s degree in 1965. That summer he took a job at Lear Siegler in Ann Arbor. His job was to increase laser power for practical uses. In this he was successful, and the work was sufficiently exciting that when the fall rolled around and the school year started, he couldn’t bring himself to crack a book. He dropped his classes so as not to fail them. Perhaps he’d return at a more favorable time…

Meanwhile, the Air Force had started its airborne laser project at Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque. They got wind of Alan’s work and offered Lear Siegler $1M to buy Alan and his laser. Alan sought counsel from his advisor. What should he do? Peter said, in essence, “Take the job at Kirtland. What you’re doing now is too groundbreaking to pass up.” Thus, in summer 1967, Alan and his family moved to Albuquerque, NM.

After moving to Albuquerque, Alan and Carol soon became involved in the local caving community, and with them explored Carlsbad Caverns and Guadalupe Mountain caves. For Alan, the thrill of exploration peaked when he found a lower maze in Three Fingers cave in the Guadalupes, leading to a spectacularly-decorated room that he named Temple of the Fire God. Being an avid cave photographer, Alan greatly enjoyed capturing its splendor for all to see.

Carol pursued geology degrees at the University of New Mexico, and begin her own groundbreaking work in the Guadalupe caves and, ultimately, the Grand Canyon caves. Alan was very supportive of Carol’s work, albeit much soft-science ribbing was to be endured. Alan and Carol were on the first research trip into Lechuguilla cave, shortly after the culvert was put through the breakdown at the bottom of the entrance pit. Alan’s research contribution was a computation in which he estimated that, based on airflow through the culvert, Lechuguilla was expected to be bigger than Carlsbad.

Meanwhile, things were going well for Alan at Kirtland. He developed revolutionary new types of high-power lasers, moved high up in the ranks, received big awards, and developed an international reputation. And yet, the Air Force bureaucracy was really starting to take its toll. By 1973 he was pondering a sanity change.

At that time Los Alamos—nearly still devoid of bureaucracy under non-nonsense director Harold Agnew—was pursuing its Antares laser fusion project. There were significant interactions between the laser scientists at AFWL and at Los Alamos. Alan reached out to his LASL friends, and director Harold Agnew offered him what was essentially a chief scientist position. This was quite an honor and very tempting, but Alan had entrepreneurial ambitions. He elected instead to form a company to pursue an idea that came from his work on laser plasmas: he believed he could make a massless plasma loudspeaker.

This goal was a long road. Alan and Carol remodeled their house to include, among other things, a rare amenity: a personal high-voltage laboratory. Alan moonlighted on the speaker project while still working at AFWL. After about three years, he had developed a speaker prototype that was within sight of a product. In 1977 he optimistically cashed out his Air Force pension, poached two of his favorite Air Force coworkers, and formed Plasmatronics, Inc. The first plasma speakers shipped in the summer of 1978.

The speaker product was a critical success, but at $8,000 per pair in 1980, it was not a best seller. It lasted about five years before the audio market took a nosedive. After that, Plasmatronics was almost solely in the CO2 laser business. Alan’s crowning achievement was a pulsed laser called Laser Ablation De-coating System (LADS), which stripped paint from aircraft radomes to refurbish them. LADS cleanly and effortlessly replaced a process that generated copious quantities of chemical waste. The system was installed at Hill AFB in Utah. Like the plasma speaker, LADS was a highly sophisticated system that has never been duplicated.

Alan had a nearly endless stream of novel ideas and their applications, for some of which he showed proof-of-principle with his own money—and many in his home laboratory—hoping that they would find funding as a result of proven viability. Unfortunately, more did not than did. There were many near misses. Alan could have made big money by giving away control of process, but he had done that at AFWL and didn’t like it. Moreover, he cared little about money for its own sake, desiring it only it to accomplish his science and technology goals. Investors were impressed—even blown away—by his feats of technology, but they didn’t smell money.

Thus, Plasmatronics had its financial ups and downs. Alan also had a string of serious health problems that at times hindered him. His work efforts slowly faded until he was physically unable to perform them. One of his last big projects was to write a chapter, in 2006, for a book entitled Gas Lasers. It outlined his many developments in the area of CO2 lasers, causing many of his ideas to endure that would have otherwise been lost.

The year 2011 marked the 50th anniversary of the first optical harmonics experiment. At that time many of the original participants, but unfortunately not Peter Franken, were still living. The University of Michigan physics department hosted a celebratory symposium, at which Alan told the story of how he met Peter and came to perform their famous experiment. Other early participants who were still living presented as well. The physics department wished to hang a plaque commemorating their most famous experiment, but needed Alan to tell them where to put it. They thought the experiment was performed somewhere in the Randall Hall basement; in reality it was performed on the fourth floor.

Also in 2011, Alan’s Russian electric laser colleagues hosted a symposium in Suzdal, at which Alan was the guest of honor. Alan was close to many of the Russian laser scientists because they—and for the most part not Americans—were the ones who had pursued his electric laser ideas. This time period marked what we now understand was the onset of his long-undiagnosed Parkinson’s disease. It was most fortunate that these honors came while Alan was still able to travel.

In his final decade, Alan was forced to make the transition from strongly doing, to just being. This was difficult at times, but as time went on, he made peace with his shrinking world. He lived long enough to be preceded in death by many family members and friends, which was difficult for him as it is for so many others.

A little prior to a month before he died, Alan and his family decided he was well enough to travel to the “Axpona” audio show in the Chicago area. This opportunity arose because Alan’s former righthand speaker-man at Plasmatronics, Tony Salsich—himself a long-time audiophile—had continued to tinker with the plasma tweeter design over the decades. With help from several others in the audio community, Tony showcased a modified variant of the plasma speakers. It was the first public hearing in 40 years. Many audiophiles attending Axpona had heard of the legendary Plasmatronics speakers, and were not disappointed to finally hear them and meet their inventor.

Robert Harley, editor of Absolute Sound magazine, published his personal impression of the plasma speakers after hearing them at Axpona:

Alan Hill, the physicist who invented the plasma tweeter 40 years ago, was on hand to witness the first public display of his driver in four decades. The plasma driver, which has no diaphragm and thus no moving mass, was paired with an Eminent Technology LFT-8c, crossed over at 1kHz. The sound was incredibly lifelike and effortless—the most natural and realistic reproduction of upper-midrange and treble I’ve ever heard.

Alan read this review over and over. He was pleased that his labor of love is still considered state of the art. Indeed, his plasma tweeter has never been duplicated, though others have tried. There are too many plasma physics subtleties even to easily reverse-engineer it from a working unit.

Many have called Alan a genius, as indeed he was. It was not so much how smart he was; rather, it was how he was smart. His mind was a fertile creative force, that was never satisfied until he understood physical phenomena in depth. He knew what it was that he didn’t know—an important, if under-appreciated, quality. These traits were amplified by his combination of optimism and strong passions, which carried him—for better and sometimes worse—into risky areas where many souls fear to tread.

While largely defined by his scientific and other passions, Alan was also a loyal son and husband, a loving father, and a good friend and fellow adventurer to many. Alan’s sons, Larry and Roy, and his honorary son Tony, owe him a debt of gratitude for the skills and the confidence that he instilled in us. He always believed we could do anything we set our minds to, which carried us through many a challenge, and which allowed us to achieve each according to our own innate and individual abilities. A greater gift could hardly be given.

Through Plasmatronics, spelunking, hiking and backpacking, skiing, and travel, Alan led his family, and often his friends and colleagues, through many unforgettable adventures. Near his life’s end he expressed satisfaction at the varied experiences he was able to have, bolstered by the knowledge that he did not shrink from life’s challenges. Like Teddy Roosevelt’s “man in the arena,” Alan gave life his all: boldly succeeding at times, and boldly failing at others. He created a legacy of important scientific and technological achievements, and in many cases, what he was first to achieve has never been duplicated. Chances are, some will not be for a very long time.

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