RIP Roger Barrett 25.01.2025

I heard from a colleague today the sad news of the death of Roger Barrett on 25^th January 2025.  When I arrived at the University of Surrey in 2000 Roger was I think, by that time, already an emeritus member of staff, but still active, and preent in the Department. In this post from last month, I included a picture taken at a 2003 event we held at Surrey, and it features Roger:

Roger is second from the left in the front row, sitting between Qiang Zhao (now at Beijing Institute for High Energy Physics) and Jim Al-Khalili, himself now an emeritus professor. 

Other more qualified people will hopefully write a bit more of a biographical reminiscence of Roger.  His scientific interests when I knew him were in higher energy physics than I worked in, but I know his background was in the lower-energy nuclear physics common to the Surrey group.  He co-authored a book with Daphne Jackson on "Nuclear Sizes and Structure", published by Oxford University Press.  Like all other member of the nuclear group at Surrey, I was gifted a copy of this book, many others of which graced the shelves of our offices.  Here I am pretending to read it, but really posing for a photo of me  holding it:

 

 

After Roger stopped coming into the Department I'd often bump into him in the town Waitrose where we both would go to get a copy of the Guardian and a cup of coffee, and I used to catch up with him, passing on news of the Department.  I hadn't bumped into him for a few years now, and I understand his health had declined in the years leading up to his death.

RIP Gottfried Münzenberg 1940–2024

 I copy and past below a press release from the FAIR facility at GSI, Darmstadt, Germany:

Press Release, 22 January 2024

Mourning for Gottfried Münzenberg 
 
GSI and FAIR mourn the loss of an outstanding scientist and pioneer of nuclear physics who shaped nuclear physics research at GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung for decades. The former GSI division head Professor Dr. Gottfried Münzenberg passed away on January 2, 2024 at the age of 83.
 
Gottfried Münzenberg had a major influence on various areas of modern nuclear physics and leaves behind a significant scientific legacy. His diversified research work ranged from the study of exotic, very light nuclei to super-heavy nuclei, touching on both fundamental physical questions and practical applications. He laid important foundations for the extension of the GSI facilities, shaped the scientific program at the Super-FRS, contributed to the design of the new apparatus and initiated the founding of the NUSTAR collaboration at FAIR.
 
During his time at GSI, he made decisive contributions to the discovery of superheavy elements and played a leading role in the design and construction of the SHIP velocity filter at Justus Liebig University in Giessen. He was head of the SHIP experiment group for the synthesis of the new chemical elements bohrium, hassium and meitnerium and, as a member of the discovery team, was closely involved in the synthesis of the elements darmstadtium, roentgenium and copernicium. Münzenberg was also co-discoverer of the double magic nuclei tin-100 and nickel-78 as well as the proton halo in boron-8. Furthermore, his scientific commitment led to the discovery of over 220 new isotopes and more than 350 new mass measurements of various isotopes.
 
Gottfried Münzenberg gained worldwide international reputation as Professor of Experimental Physics at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and head of the Nuclear Structure and Nuclear Chemistry departments at GSI. He initiated and fostered numerous international collaborations and was passionately committed to the promotion of young scientists.
 
For his outstanding scientific achievements, Gottfried Münzenberg has received many high-ranking awards and honors, including the Röntgen Prize of the Justus Liebig University in Giessen, the Physics Prize of the German Physical Society, the Otto Hahn Prize of the City of Frankfurt, the Gold Medal of the Comenius University in Bratislava, the SUNAMCO Medal of the IUPAP, the Lise Meitner Prize of the European Physical Society and the Medal of Honor of the Hellenic Nuclear Physics Society.
 
GSI and FAIR will always remember Gottfried Münzenberg as an outstanding scientist, a valued source of inspiration, and above all as a great person full of warmth and with an incomparable sense of witty humor. His colleagues and friends will keep his wisdom, kindness and friendship in lasting memory. The management of GSI/FAIR extends its deepest condolences to his family.    

This press release with pictures is available on our website:

https://www.gsi.de/en/start/news/details/2024/01/22/trauer-um-gottfried-muenzenberg

RIP Bill Newton-Smith

 Through a friend's Facebook post, I learn that Bill Newton-Smith has died.  Bill was one of the four people who interviewed and subsequently accepted me for a place at Balliol College, Oxford, to read Physics and Philosophy.  Bill was the philosopher in the room, and was joined by Johanthan Hodby, Dave Wark, and David Brink, whose death I recently commented on.  

As far as I remember, Bill asked one question in the interview, along the lines of "When I say something is red and you say something is red, how can we agree that we are talking about the same thing?"  I remember giving some kind of answer based on sets of red things, and perhaps more physical argument based on wavelengths.  I don't know how good an answer it was, but I was accepted as a Physics and Philosophy student.  Actually, I think the acceptance was based almost entirely on my admission examination performance in maths and physics, which I later learned I completely aced.  I also sat a general paper for the philosophy-based part of my admission, where I wrote a pseudish stream-of-consciousness set of answers, not really knowing how to answer essay-type questions.  I suspect these were not read.

Anyway - I had Bill Newton-Smith for philosophy tutorials every week in the first term, and the subject was formal logic, which I enjoyed.  I liked mostly the study into the extent that language is used to convey ideas more than the mathematical logic aspects which in the first semester were quite trivial.  I enjoyed the tutorials and got the feeling that Bill liked the questions I asked about language.  I found him fun, and intimidating.

At the end of the first term I went home for the vacations and did not want to return to University.  A depression that I had not named as such was manifesting itself in a bleak and horrific way and I felt happier at home with my old friends.  Though I had made friends at Uni, I didn't feel settled there, and I didn't feel at all prepared to go back.  I didn't feel like I understood anything much, and had never learnt good study skills, having found school easy.  My sympathetic tutors had no magic bullet, but the suggestion that I switch to straight Physics, which I tried, was a kind of mental reset to help me start again, and I suppose to some extent it worked.  Well, at least I stayed at University.  It meant no more philosophy tutorials with Bill Newton-Smith, and a lingering sense of failure.  

His name, Bill, was short for William, as usual, and his middle initial was H., so he appeared on documents as W H Newton-Smith.  I idly speculated that the inclusion of Newton in his name was in order not to be called "WH Smith" after the stationer. 

I'm aware from the testimony of others who interacted with him in a more extended way than I did, that he was a fine man.  RIP Bill.  

Bill Newton Smith (from CEU news report)

RIP Ikuko Hamamoto

 I received an email today with the sad new that Ikuko Hamamoto died on 10th March 2023.  I cannot do better (since I didn't know her personally) than to copy this biographical note I found hosted on the Lund University website.  The full document is interesting and gives a bit of a history of the nuclear group in Lund, including such key facts as they took a ferry once a week to Copenhagen to attend lectures of Ben Mottelson, then spending the ferry back to Sweden discussing the lecture. 

Her oldest publication, from 1962 when the Beatles were just starting their recording career, comes with an affiliation of University of Tokyo, co-authored with Akito Arima, and her most recent was in 2021, sharing an affiliation between Lund where she spend much of her career, with Tokyo where she returned in her final years.

RIP Don Perkins 1925-2022

 I saw from an email today that Don Perkins died.  He was a professor of particle physics at Oxford when I was there as an undergraduate.  At least, he retired when I was still early on in my undergraduate studies around 30 years ago, but became an emeritus fellow after retirement.  I did not know Prof Perkins, but heard his name invoked, and treated his textbook Introduction to High Energy Physics as the bible for any particle physics studies I had to do as an undergrad.

I recal in one tutorial with Dave Wark that we had found what appeared to be a mistake in the textbook.  Dave saw Don and said "Don! I think we've found a mistake in your textbook!" "hah!  only one?" was his response.  RIP, Don.

R. I. P. Ricardo Broglia (1939–2022)

I saw on Twitter last week that Ricardo Broglia has died.  Broglia was a big name in nuclear theory during my nuclear physics career.  His work on nuclear structure and reactions has had a lot of impact, and he brought together a group in the University of Milan which has become one of the centres of low energy nuclear theory research.  As far as I know, I never really met him, though I dare say we might have been at the same conference together at some point over the last 20 years.

He was a collaborator of David Brink, who I did know, and who died last year.  In fact, I was searching a second hand book website recently for a book including a chapter by David Brink which I wanted to read.  I found the book and ordered it, but also saw available a copy of Brink and Broglia's Nuclear Superfluidity, which I ordered too.  I have not properly read it yet, but when I heard of Broglia's death, I picked it up and had a look through, wistful for the future nevertime when I will have a chance to study it in detail.  Attached it a picture of me pretending to read it while actually concentrating on taking a selfie of me reading it.  

The Milan group website has a more informative biographical picture of him.

RIP Ben Mottelson 1926 - 2022

I saw announced on Facebook, via my colleague and friend Adam Maj from Krakow, that Ben Mottelson has died.  It took a couple of days for Wikipedia to catch up, but there I saw a link to a Danish news story seeming to confirm it.

Ben Mottelson was a co-recipient of the 1975 Nobel Prize for his work in nuclear physics, specifically unifying the theories of single particle and collective motion in nuclei, and for showing that nuclei could be deformed in their ground states.  The co-recipients of the prize, Aage Bohr and James Rainwater died in 1986 and 2009 respectively.  Mottelson worked closely with Aage Bohr and though the prize was split equally three ways, the prize was effectively for Rainwater's work and for Bohr and Mottelson's largely joint work. 

I don't think I've ever seen Mottelson at a conference or anywhere else, and have little I can add personally as an anecdote.   He is most well-known to me as the author of the two volumes, with Aage Bohr, of the the Nuclear Structure textbook.  This seminal work educated generations of nuclear physicsists.  I'm afraid I haven't studied the book as much as either I should have or would have liked to, and only eventually acquired my own copy rather recently, but here I am having (or pretending to for the camera) a read of it

RIP Sir Clive Sinclair

 

Last week brought the sad news of the death of Clive Sinclair.  He had a huge impact on my life through the computers he invented with his Sinclair Research company.  

I was 8 years old when we got our first computer - a Sinclair ZX Spectrum.  It had 48k of memory, and cost £175.  The photo shows me holding it in my hand (picture taken last week).  It makes it look very small!  I had no idea what a computer was when my dad told me we were getting one, and I asked about playing games on it.  He explained that yes you could play games, but you have to tell it how, or program it first.  I remember wondering if that meant that latent inside it was a more-or-less fully-formed version of Space Invaders that somehow needed unlocking. Of course, it's not quite like that, but I was completely fascinated by the computer and what could be created inside it.  It came with a big manual of how to program it with the built-in Basic interpreter.  I went through a lot of that manual, and typed in lots of programs from books and magazines and learnt the rudiments of programming.  

As I grew older, I mainly just played games on it, often with friends from school - and my weekends were spent cycling to a friend's house to play on their computer or have them come to mine to do the same.  The ability to use a computer to create worlds in one's imagination seemed to me easily to rival that of any other medium.  It was also a very cultural phenomenon at the time, at least to my peers and me.  We had ridiculous rivalry between computers with a kind of understanding of what owning each one meant.  The Spectrum was in some sense at the lowest end of the technical pecking order, and it had social associations with its mass-market appeal and vast base of games, while better-off parents with good intentions for their children would get the recommended BBC computer for their children, and there was a kind of (middle) class-related badge to having one.  The Commodore 64, much better technically than the spectrum, American, and with an ample supply of games signified a better-off family with the populist strain that the Spectrum embodied.

Sinclair as a businessman seemed at once both astute and reckless as he quickly turned great success into failure and the company - at least the computer part of it - was bought out by technically and socially humdrum rival Amstrad who brought out a souped-up "Spectrum +2" which we got to replace our original Spectrum.  I still used that computer to exclusively play games on, and gaming was my main motivation for getting a Commodore Amiga when I was something like 14 years old.  My Dad had said, when I got it, that he hoped I would do more than just play games on it, and in fact I did really start getting to grips with a lot of how it worked and how to program it.  It came with AmigaBasic, but I wanted something a bit more powerful.  Unfortunately commerical compilers for languages like C on the Amiga were quite expensive.  The affordable option, because the technology was much simpler, was to get a machine code assembler which required one to directly program at the level of the CPU's native instruction set, but at least did not involve the "hand-assembly" of converting the maching op-codes into numbers.  So it was that one of the first languages I really wrote complete codes that I shared was 68k assembler.  That became my go-to language for doing anything, and with the library routines of the Amiga's operating system to assist, one could write quite sophisticated things in a modest amount of machine code.  I used to solve mathematics problems from my GCSE class on it, and sometimes submit answers alongside computer code.  I have no idea what my teachers made of it, but I suppose I assumed that if I could understand it, so could / should they.  I was never told to stop, and did the same in my GCSE "Technology" exam, which I now see would have flummoxed the examiner, who graciously erred on the side of giving me a high mark.

I remember very little of 68k machine code now, but have been programming in one language or another since about that time, and it is a significant part of my work as a physics lecturer and researcher..  It all started with that Spectrum, though, and even if I ended up using it for playing games on, I did get the seeds of programming at that time, and thought of using typed computer language instructions as a perfectly natural way of getting computers to do what you want them to.

RIP Steven Moszkowski 1927–2020

 

I just heard the news that Steven Moszkowski died in December.  I heard of his death from my PhD supervisor, Jirina Stone, who has been working with him in recent years (with a highly-cited paper co-authored by Moszkowski, Jirina Stone, and her husband Nick Stone published in 2014).  I met Steven once, as far as I can remember, but I knew his name for his work on effective interactions for use in nuclear structure calculations - particularly the surface delta interaction (SDI).  I was reminded of him recently when a final year project student I've been working with this semester was working on a solvable model of octupole states in lead-208, as worked out by Piet van Isacker.  It made use of this SDI interaction, since although it is not a fundamental nucleon-nucleon interaction, still captures enough of the correct physics to be very useful, and is conceptually and mathematically simple.

Like my meetings with many of the older generation of nuclear physicists, I felt a bit inadequate to collaborate with them, and have clearly now missed my opportunity.  As I say, I only met Moszkowski one time (that I recall).  From the short memorial page to him at his institution, UCLA, it sounds like there were a lot of interesting stories he could have told me.  RIP, Steven.

RIP David Brink 1930–2021

I read the sad news yesterday that David Brink died in the early hours yesterday morning.  

David Brink made a significant impact into the theory of nuclear physics starting from his DPhil thesis from Oxford in 1955.  It is still highly-cited today as the source of the Brink-Axel hypothesis (along with a development from Peter Axel in 1961) which states that each excited state of a nucleus should have a giant dipole resonance associated with it, with a structure largely independent of the details of the excited state.

He made important contributions across nuclear structure and reaction theory, and it is his work applying the Skyrme interaction using the Hartree-Fock procedure that has influenced my research the most.  His paper with Dominique Vautherin (in Phys Rev C) is one which my PhD students all have to work through in order to understand the basis of the methods I use in much of my own research.  The paper has been cited over 2,000 times (according to the ISI database) and I might account for about 1% of those citations. 

I did know David Brink personally, and most of my interaction dates back a bit before I really interacted closely with his nuclear physics research work.  I think I can recount the sum of my memories of him without making an overly-long blog post.

Applying to Oxford

From secondary school I applied to Oxford to study Physics and Philosophy.  My school (a local comprehensive in Essex) had no particular links to Oxford, or much recent history of sending pupils there (I was the only applicant from my year) but they did at least encourage me to apply.  On getting to the stage in my education to potentially apply to university,  I had little or no idea about universities in general and that it made some kind of sense to go to as "good" a university as you could.  I was thinking of probably applying to polytechnics via PCAS though in the end I didn't, partly because I plumped for physics as a subject to study and that were mostly offered only by universities which one applied to via UCCA in those days.  Anyway, I was not particularly aware that Oxford was considered a top university, but went to some open days at the suggestion of my school, as I did also to Cambridge.  The open days were college-based, and I looked at more modern colleges - I remember going to St Cats and St Anne's - thinking that might be the right kind of place for a neophyte like me.  I liked the visits very much and decided to apply

In the end I applied to St Cats.  I was called up to one of the teachers at school one day to say that St Cats had got in touch to say that while they do in principle accept students for physics and philsophy, they were not going to take any this year, so I'd be better changing to another college, and they suggested Balliol, which was the principal phys-phil college (them taking more than any other college).  So, my application was amended to Balliol and I was called up for interview there in December 1991, having sat the entrance exams at school shortly before that. 

I went to Oxford for interviews wearing my standard attire of the time, which involved my favourite jumper with holes all down one of the arms, and a duffel coat which was a bit less ragged, but not quite elegant either.  I remember being slightly surprised when lots of the other applicants turned up in suits, even to the parts of the process in which we were just hanging out in college, accommodated for a night or two (or more depending if other colleges called us up for interview that week, which did happen).  There was one other girl I met, Vicky Whitford, also up for physics, who was dressed in cool grungy clothes, but who then transformed into a very smart uniform for the time of her interview itself.  I just didn't think to take any smart clothes with me.  Not that I had any apart from my school uniform.

Anyway - I mention the clothes partly because being the only one with no smart clothes was something I remember from the time, but also because I remember my interviewers having to remind me to pick up my coat, hanging on the back of the office door when I left with a series of unintentially comedic lines like "Oh, don't forget your coat!" to "we wouldn't want to be left with it here" and "not that it isn't a nice coat.  It is a nice coat ..." and so on.  At least it covered up the tatty jumper!  The office I was in for that interview was David Brink's office, above the Senior Common Room.  In the interview were me, David Brink, David Wark, Jonathan Hodby (those three there for physics) and Bill Newton-Smith (for philosophy).  I don't remember all the questions I was asked in what I remember as quite a short interview (about 20 minutes).  I do remember that David Brink showed me a postcard and asked me what, physically, was wrong with the picture.  It was a Japanese style print with a mountain in the background and a lake in the foreground.  There was a reflection of the mountain in the lake, but it was off to one side.  I saw what was wrong, and struggled to articulate it in the language of a physicist, and in the end David prompted me by asking what is particular about an incident light ray, a reflected light ray, and the normal to the surface at which it is reflected and I said the right thing - that they are all in the same plane. 

As an Undergraduate at Oxford

I was duly accepted to Balliol and spent three years there studying physics (I switched from phys-phil to just physics during the first year).  Around the beginning of the first term David Brink invited all the new physics + phys-phil students to his house for a little party, which I took to be a tradition of his.  We all navigated together to his house somewhere down Cowley Rd (an unknown part of town to us who had just arrived as Undergraduates, but I think I remember the address as being on Divinity Rd).  I remember meeting his wife Verena there, I think the only time I did meet her, and somehow coping with the small talk.  My abiding memory, though, is the communal unspoken sense of not knowing what to do when it was clearly time we should be leaving because it was late.  In the end, I piped up and said I think it was time I was heading back and there seemed to be a sense of relief that somebody had said it.  Indeed, one of the other phys-phil students (Clare Brown) thanked me for it!  Funny how these are the memories that abide from that time.

At Oxford, a key part of the education was in tutorials and every week I had to attempt and submit problems in physics and philosophy to be discussed in tutorials, and some of these were with David Brink.  In these tutorials, David gave the impression of being somewhat of a scatty professor, but it was only an impression.  If there was a problem that the students were stuck on, he'd look at it.  Say "ah" repeatedly in a way that sounded like it indeed was a sticky problem, rub his hands up and down his thighs as if a bit of help with blood circulation would help things, and then, when it looked like he might have forgotten how to speak, or might possibly have passed away (I thought him old, but he was only early 60s then) he would come out with the most impressive resolution of the problem, which was just perfect in terms of communicating to undergraduates like me, as well as so obviously being correct. 

The tutorials were in his office above the Senior Common Room - the staff room for the fellows of the college.  I didn't know at first that this was the purpose of the big room below his office, but what I did know is that up next to his office was a door out onto a flat roof which usually seemed to be kept unlocked.   One night, then, after drinking with a group in the college bar, I somehow thought of suggesting we go up to this roof, and so we did. One of the College porters came to get us.   I don't remember his name, but he was the stern Scottish one, and he let it be known that we were in serious trouble for trying to break into the Senior Common Room.  As he led us through the quad in dim evening light, Iain Corby from the year above me, who had a reputation as a conservative sort, suggested we run away.  This seemed very wise since in the low light, the ability of one man to lead a large bunch of students across the grass did indeed seem rather limited, so I walked, or ran, off, leaving the porter to take some fraction of the group to the lodge.   My name was, however, given in as one of the perpetrators of this great crime and I did receive some ticking off later.

I think David Brink left Balliol on extended leave after my first year to take up a position in ECT* (European Centre for Theoretical Nuclear Physics) in Italy as director of the institution, so I did not have him as a tutor beyond my first year.

Postgrad and later

I stayed on at Oxford to do a DPhil in theoretical nuclear physics.  It was David Brink's subject, though I don't think I realised that when I embarked on my D.Phil (and indeed, David was still away in Trento, Italy).  My choice of nuclear physics came from having enjoyed the optional paper in my final year - a combined nuclear and particle physics paper, if I remember rightly - and that in part because I enjoyed learning from the particular tutor who taught it.  It was not necessarily the most sensible choice, since it was a subject on the wane in Oxford.  They had already made a deliberate decision that particle physics was the future where nuclear physics was the past, and all the experimental effort was shifted to particle physics, with a few of the older theorists (like Peter Hodgson and Brian Buck) still keeping on with nuclear physics.  I, in fact, joined a mostly experimental group working in the condensed matter department which really did nuclear physics, but which was physically sited in the building which had access to the low temperature facilities needed for their work.  The group was run by Nick and Jirina Stone, with Jirina being a theorist who became my supervisor.  

I spent much of my postgraduate student time in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, as I was funded and co-supervised from there, and didn't see much of David Brink.  I do remember meeting him once or twice when back in Oxford both during my DPhil and after, but perhaps the largest role he directly played in my life then was to be my internal examiner for my viva.  Although I remember what question he asked in my undergraduate admission interview, I don't remember what he asked in my DPhil exam.  I only remember one question, from the other examiner, Ted Barnes, which asked me to compare nuclei to metals.  I suppose that was the question I struggled with most and hence remember still now!  I think, more importantly than passing my thesis, David helped behind the scenes supporting my early career with references and reviews to help me get established at Surrey and in the UK community as a young researcher. 

The last time I saw David was, I think, when he came to Surrey to give a seminar, which according to my email records might have been in January 2008.  That would make sense as I recall he was talking about a paper he published in 2007 with Stancu.  This revisited old work the pair had done together (also with Hubert Flocard) in 1977 on the tensor part of the Skyrme interaction.  It had just been rediscovered by others and a mass of new interest in the topic had caused a flourishing of new results.  

More recently another Brink and Stancu paper was published, in 2018, following up on the subject. This was nearly his last research paper, with another (with Angela Bonaccorso) coming later in 2018.  I don't know if there are any others to be finished up and published by co-authors, but even 2018 is an amazing 62 years after his first paper was published, a single-author paper on the shell-model applied to Pb-208.  That paper, I suppose, was just a diversion from his main PhD work.

and finally

well, I said this could be a fairly short post recounting my interactions with David.  In the end, it was not so short.  David Brink was involved in my life as a physicist either directly or through his work since I first met him in 1991, 30 years ago, which is after all not a short time. 

These were my personal reminiscences.  In the email announcing his death his close friend and collaborator Angela Bonaccorso linked to a paper she wrote about David in 2006 where one can more written about him.  No doubt more obituaries will follow, including a full article in the Royal Society's Biographical Memoirs journal, since all FRSs get an extensive obituary there.  I look forward to reading that when it comes.

I don't think I have a picture of David of my own.  Taking pictures of my University lecturers was not something which occurred to me, though there may well be one somewhere of PhD viva day.  Here is a picture I found online from the website of the same meeting where Angela presented the paper just linked to:

 

RIP Bill Rae

The sad new of Bill Rae's death has been brought to my attention by my colleague and friend Wilton Catford.  Wilton knew Bill considerably better than I did, and he (Wilton) has kindly let me share the following obituary of him:

Some of you working in the same research area as me will have heard of Bill Rae and maybe even have known him. Bill was a friend of mine and one of the most gifted nuclear physicists that I have met. We've just heard via a mutual friend Dick Hunt that Bill has passed away, so I'd like to pass that information along. 

 

Bill was born in 1951 in Scotland and was very Scottish. From 1976 to 1978 he initiated and wrote OXBASH, deliberately designed as a shell model code that could be accessed and used by experimenters. It remained one of the most powerful codes in the field until Bill completely rewrote it in 2005, calling it Nushell. 

 

In 2006, he wrote a different programme that used new innovations in matrix multiplication to hugely extend the capability - this was called Nushellx and remains one of the world leaders. During the 80s and 90s, Bill became a Fellow of both Trinity College Oxford and St Cross College Oxford. Bill was forced to retire at age 50 in 2000 due to the debilitative effects of Parkinson's Disease, which eventually stopped him programming at his home in Garsington (just outside of Oxford) in 2009 but which he fought off for nearly 30 years. Amongst other things, he subsequently invented his own walking stick (cane) with a laser (of illegal power, bought through eBay to his great amusement) that allowed him to walk in a straight line by following the red dot on the ground. 

 

Bill is best known for the shell model work, but he also began a renaissance in alpha-clustering work both experimentally and theoretically. He wrote a new code in the 1990s to use the Brink model and extensively published new results, and he personally designed with Dick Hunt the electronics for the world's leading (at the time) multichannel data acquisition system for silicon strip detectors which underpinned the cutting-edge work of the Charissa collaboration (which he founded) in the UK and at laboratories in France, the USA and Australia. 

 

At times taciturn, his sense of humour was as rapier sharp as his scientific brilliance and he was a pleasure and an inspiration to work with. Vale, William Dickson Mudie Rae.

 

W D M Rae in 2007, courtesy B A Brown

 

Paul-Henri Heenen 1947–2019

I received the latest copy of Nuclear Physics News today and was saddened to read of the death of Paul-Henri Heenen.  I knew Paul-Henri mainly through his work on building the Generator Coordinate Method on top of the nuclear mean-field to give a rather complete model of nuclear structure starting from an effective interaction and giving results at the bulk level (nuclear masses, sizes, and shapes) and spectroscopic level (details of excited state energies and transition rates) all in one picture.  I cite his review, co-authored with Michael Bender and P.-G. Reinhard in practically every paper I write. 

I met Paul-Henri many times at different conferernces and meetings.  I was particualrly struck by his humility when discussing his work, partly because it is an all-too-rare trait.  Despite the fact that his work was heroic in its sophistication and completeness, he was honest about the deficiencies.  Many people I know are quick to point out only the good points of their own work, and the bad points of others'. 

RIP Paul-Henri.  The picture is taken from the defi.eu website.

Raj K Gupta (1938–2019)

I read from various friends and colleagues on Facebook that Prof Raj K Gupta of Panjab University, Chandigarrh, has died.  I have read several touching stories about him on Facebook from physicists who knew him and worked closely with him over the years, and it is clear that he had a strong and positive impact on many younger physicists across India. 

I worked with him (long-distance) via a collaborator, Suresh Patra, who came to Surrey for several month to work on giant resonances with me.  I then got involved a bit in a project on clustering and cluster radioactivity that Suresh worked on with Prof Gupta, it being the latter's specialty.  In the end, I published a few papers as co-author with Prof Gupta, as part of this collaboration, though I did not meet him until after this time, during a conference visit to New Delhi.  My research interests have evolved since that time, partly into heavy-ion fusion reactions, where I see his name regularly in publications about ioi-ion potentials in which he developed some important results.  Judging by those Facebook posts his scientific and personal legacy will both continue after his death.

Roy Glauber 1925–2018

I saw (initially from Peter Woit's blog) that Roy Glauber died a few days ago.  Glauber's name is known to nuclear physicists for his approximate treatment of scattering theory which can be applied to nuclear collisions at high energies.  It was an ingredient in some of the seminal work from the nuclear theory group in Surrey when we became the go-to people for the reaction theory needed to understand the reaction of halo nuclei, and the extraction of their sizes. I say "we" – this was slightly before my time at the group.  Here is a paper by Jim Al-Khalili and Jeff Tostevin from 1996 on the subject of nuclear sizes, making use of Glauber theory. 

Nuclear Physics was a relatively small part of Glauber's work.  His biggest thing, at least the thing that got him the Nobel Prize, was his foundational work on quantum optics.  The picture attached to this post is Glauber at the Nobel Prize Ceremony in 2005, courtesy of Wikipedia.

David Pines, 1924–2018

I have just learnt that the physicist David Pines died last week, aged 93.  He was not a nuclear physicist, and he and I never crossed paths, but his work on quantum many-body physics may just as well have been developed by someone working on nuclear physics as on the correlated electron systems that Pines was working on.

He was one of the key players in the Random Phase Approximation (RPA) which allows one to treat the very complicated system of many particles interacting together under the rules of quantum mechanics as a simpler problem of non-interacting particles.  It is very widely used in nuclear physics.  He also wrote and co-wrote, some very useful textbooks.  I have a couple sitting behind me on my shelf, and they are well-used.  The picture I have included here is a scan from the the back panel of the dust jacket from my copy of his book Quantum Liquids, co-written with Philippe Noizières.  The book dates from 1966, and presumably the picture from around that time.  Certainly no later.  More recent pictures and biographies can be found at the Santa Fe Institute where he latterly worked, and in a more personal reminiscence from Piers Coleman, co-director of the Institute for Complex Matter, which Pines founded.

My closest (albeit non-) encounter with Pines occurred when I was collaborating with Chris Hooley of St Andrew's University.  Chris is a condensed matter physicist, working on strongly-correlated electron systems.  Pines was being invited to St Andrews, perhaps to receive a prize -- I don't remember exactly, but in any case there was to be a formal dinner at which Chris would have to give a speech introducing Pines.  This was to happen shortly after Chris was visiting me in Surrey for some work we were doing together (see here, if interested).  He was wondering what to say in his speech, and I suggested he say something along the lines of "It gives me great pleasure to welcome a physicist whose surname is an anagram of a body part.  I refer, of course, to the spine." 

I expect he didn't use this line, but you never know. 

RIP Mark E Smith

I've been known to post music on this blog for various reasons, including as tributes to artists who have recently died.  As one of the many fans of The Fall in the UK nuclear physics community, I feel I ought to mark the death The Fall's Mark E Smith last month with a song of theirs.

I was reminded of it the last time I attended the annual Institute of Physics Nuclear Physics Conference when it was in Birmingham.  The conference venue was the University of Birmingham's Business School

Incidentally, the external examiner for our physics degrees used to be one Mark E Smith, of the University of Warwick.  As I recall, he is well aware of his namesake. 

Fidel Castro Díaz-Balart 1949-2018

A few days ago I received the latest copy of Nuclear Physics News International, a quarterly magazine about nuclear physics and its applications, produced on behalf of NuPECC ("Nuclear Physics European Collaboration Committee").

One of the articles in the magazine was "On the Development of Nuclear Physics in Cuba".  It gives, as the name suggests, a description of nuclear physics research in Cuba; an academic activity that started after the 1976 construction of a nuclear power plant in concert with support from the USSR.  The activity included a lot of applications of nuclear and radiation research, such as production of medical isotopes, industrial profiling, dating of samples, environmental monitoring, as well as more pure physics studies.  I had the pleasure of attending one of the conferences organised by the nuclear physics researchers in Cuba some years ago (2005, if I remember correctly), and remember being impressed by the range of applications being worked on by the students.  

The article in Nuclear Physics News International was written by Fidel Castro Díaz-Balart, a member of the Academy of Sciences of Cuba, and key mover in the Cuban nuclear research programme.  He also happens to be a son of Fidel Castro, erstwhile Cuban leader, which has made him of interest to the news media.  Because of this, I was able to read of his death, alas, which was reported this morning.  He had been suffering from depression, and in the end he killed himself.  It's tragic to hear of a fellow human's suffering, whoever they are, but as a colleague in the international nuclear physics community, it's a reminder to me (as if I needed it) that mental health problems know no borders of nationality, of rich or poor, famous or unknown.  According to the reports (from Granma, the Cuban communist party's newspaper), Dr Castro had been suffering from some time, including spells in hospital.  At least, then, he was getting treatment.  Another reminder; mental health problems can be treated.  

I was put off reading the article in Nuclear Physics News because of the misaligned printing (see picture).  If you want to read it, follow the "latest copy" link in the first line of the blog post.

RIP Glen Campbell

I learned today that Glen Campbell had died.  His most famous song is probably Wichita Lineman.  I think I heard it first through this cover by REM.  It's a fine song.

Walter Greiner 1935 - 2016

I don't think I posted anything here last year noting the death of Walter Greiner.  He was a major figure in nuclear physics in all the time I've been doing it, and someone closely related to people I have had close links with research-wise, though I only actually bumped into him a couple of times that I remember.  

Anyway, I notice that the European Physical Society posted an obituary of him earlier this month, so rather than attempt to write a potted biography of someone I knew mostly through second-hand observations,  I direct interested readers to the EPS obituary.

Ludvig Faddeev (1934 – 2017)

I saw from a friend's Facebook post that Ludvig Faddeev, known to me for his eponymous equations, died a couple of days ago.

Faddeev was a mathematician and physicist whose work is of great importance in few-body nuclear physics.  In particular, he developed a method for solving the quantum three-body problem that can be used when studying, e.g the triton or 3He, but also weakly-bound nuclei in which there is 2-neutron halo along with a strongly-bound core, such as 11Li. 

At this point I have to confess that I have never tried solving the Faddeev equation myself, though this blog post is tempting me to do so.  If someone reading would like to write a quick primer, then I'd be more than happy to post it here.