Obituary: Benjamin Mottelson, who revolutionized understanding of the atomic nucleus
Benjamin Mottelson was a US-born physicist who specialized in theoretical work on the structure of the atomic nucleus. During the 1950s, in close collaboration with his Danish colleague Aage Bohr, Mottelson constructed a theory known as the collective model, which was greatly superior to previous nuclear models.
Mottelson, who has died aged 95, spent almost his entire research career in Copenhagen, where he was a leading figure in the nuclear-physics community. His work revitalized the University of Copenhagen’s Institute for Theoretical Physics, founded by Niels Bohr in 1921 and renamed in 1965 as the Niels Bohr Institute. Mottelson’s enthusiasm, extroversion and broad interests made him a treasured teacher and lecturer in Denmark as well as overseas.
Born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1926, Mottelson graduated from secondary school during the Second World War and was then sent by the US Navy to Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, for officer training. He received his bachelor’s degree from Purdue in 1947 and went on to do graduate studies in nuclear physics at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with Julian Schwinger, who would receive the 1965 Nobel prize for his contributions to quantum electrodynamics.
Until 1950, the favoured model of the atomic nucleus was the shell model, so called because nucleons occupied quantum levels, or shells, like the atomic electrons. However, Aage Bohr then suggested that the nucleus might rotate like a viscous liquid ellipsoid — something like a rotating raw egg. As soon as Mottelson arrived in Copenhagen and met Bohr, they began to collaborate on models of atomic nuclei.
In 1953, in a 174-page essay published by the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, Bohr and Mottelson presented what became known as the collective, or unified, model of nuclear structure. It incorporated features of the shell model and the rival liquid-drop model, which pictured the nucleons as analogous to the molecules in a water droplet.
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