L. James Rainwater and the Atomic Nucleus

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Courtesy AIP Emilio Segre Visual
Archives, W. F. Meggers
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"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".

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Additional information about Leo James Rainwater and his research about atomic nucleus is available in electronic documents and on the Web.

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