James Rainwater and the Atomic Nucleus· Resources with Additional Information "During W.W. II, I [James Rainwater] worked ... [on the] Manhattan Project, mainly doing pulsed neutron spectroscopy using the small Columbia cyclotron. ... [Maria Geoppert-Mayer] shell model suggestion in 1949 was a great triumph and fitted my belief that a nuclear shell model should represent a proper approach to understanding nuclear structure. Combined with developments of Weizsaker's semi-empirical explanation of nuclear binding, and the Bohr-Wheeler 1939 paper on nuclear fission, emphasizing distorted nuclear shapes, I was prepared to see an explanation of large nuclear quadrupole moments. The full concept came to me in late 1949 when attending a colloquium by Prof. C.H. Townes who described the experimental situation for nuclear quadrupole moments. It was a fortuitous situation made even more so by the fact that I was sharing an office with Aage Bohr that year. We had many discussions of the implications, subsequently very successfully exploited by Bohr, [Ben] Mottelson, and others of the Copenhagen Institute."1 Rainwater, Mottelson, and Bohr received the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of the connection between collective motion and particle motion in atomic nuclei and the development of the theory of the structure of the atomic nucleus based on this connection". Rainwater later received the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award for his contributions to nuclear physics. 1Edited excerpts from James
Rainwater – Autobiography
Top Resources with Additional InformationAdditional information about James Rainwater and his research is available in full-text. Documents:
Nuclear
Energy Level Argument for a Spheroidal Nuclear Model; Physical Review,
Vol. 79 Issue 3: 432-434, August 1, 1950
Experimental Study of the µ- Meson Mass and the Vacuum Polarization in Mesonic Atoms; Physical Review, Vol. 95, Issue 1: 291-292, July 1, 1954 Theory of Multiple Coulomb Scattering from Extended Nuclei; DOE Technical Report, August 1954; Physical Review, Vol. 95, Issue 4: 1107-1109, August 15, 1954; Physical Review, Vol. 97, Issue 2: 492-504, January 15, 1955 Phase-Shift Optical Model Calculations for the Elastic Scattering of Pions on Aluminum; Physical Review, Vol. 100, Issue 5: 1431-1439, December 1, 1955 Background for the spheroidal nuclear model proposal; Review of Modern Physics, Vol. 48, Issue 3: 385-391, July 1976 Research in Neutron Velocity Spectroscopy. Final Report, DOE Technical Report, 1976 |
