Arthur Kerman

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Arthur Kent Kerman (born May 3, 1929 in Montreal - † May 11, 2017 ) was a Canadian-American nuclear physicist .

Kerman studied physics and mathematics at McGill University and received his doctorate in 1953 from Victor Weisskopf at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a dissertation on surface vibrations in cores. As a post-doctoral student , he was with Robert F. Christy at Caltech in 1953/54 and from 1954 for two years at the Institute for Theoretical Physics ( Niels Bohr Institute ) in Copenhagen, where at that time the well-known nuclear physicists Aage Bohr and Ben Mottelson were also Niels Bohr were. In 1956 he became an assistant professor at MIT, an associate professor in 1960 and a professor in 1964. From 1976 to 1983 he was director of the Center for Theoretical Physics at MIT and 1983 to 1992 of the Laboratory for Nuclear Science. In 1999 he retired. He lived in Winchester, Massachusetts .

In 1959/60 he was at the Argonne National Laboratory and was a consultant for Shell in Houston and the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory. In 1961 he was a visiting professor in Paris and a Guggenheim Fellow. For a short time he also worked with Sheldon Glashow for the JASON Defense Advisory Group (it was about a trial project as a candidate, where you could choose between civil or military areas, with Glashow Kerman was one of the few who opted for civilian matters Report concerned remote intelligence surveillance of the Soviet Union and was classified as secret) but did not become a member. He also advised other major research laboratories such as Los Alamos, Argonne, Brookhaven (RHIC), SLAC, Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore, Oak Ridge and the National Bureau of Standards and in various functions the Department of Energy (DOE) and was an influential science organizer, who mostly preferred to stay in the background. He was one of the science advisors to President Ronald Reagan . He led the effort to bring the Superconducting Super Collider to Massachusetts, but despite extensive preparatory work, they did not have the support of Governor Michael Dukakis. The SSC eventually came to Texas but was discontinued in 1993.

He dealt with theoretical nuclear physics (e.g. nuclear structure, nuclear reactions, QCD in heavy ion collisions), accelerator physics (laser accelerators) and the development of particle detectors. He developed a nucleon-nucleon potential with a soft core (soft core), which proved useful in the study of finite nuclei and nuclear matter, but which reproduced the nucleon-nucleon scatter data just as well as potentials with a hard core. He published about the Coriolis effect in rotating nuclei, isobaric analog states , possible islands of stability in the transuranic elements, pair correlation in nuclei, application of the Hartree-Fock method to the ground states of spherical and deformed nuclei, transition structures in nuclear reactions. He also advocated the consideration of QCD degrees of freedom in nuclear physics early on. Most recently he was working on a new theory of dark matter and dark energy (with Mark Mueller).

In the 1950s and 1960s he served on the Physical Science Study Committee for textbooks and course materials, and contributed to the new Experimental Introductory Physics Course (PANIC) at MIT's Education Research Center.

He was the Associate Editor of the Reviews of Modern Physics. At MIT he had over 40 PhD students. He has published over 120 scientific articles.

He was a Fellow of the American Physical Society , the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (since 1972), and the New York Academy of Sciences .

He was married to Enid Ehrlich for 64 years and had three sons and two daughters.

Fonts (selection)

  • Nuclear surface oscillations, Physical Review, Volume 92, 1953, pp. 1176-1183.
  • with David Brink : Two body forces in light deformed nuclei, Nuclear Physics, Volume 12, 1959, pp. 314-326.
  • with Abraham Klein : The description of rotating nuclei, Physics Letters, Volume 1, 1962, pp. 185-187.
  • with Abraham Klein: Generalized Hartree-Fock approximation for the calculation of collective states of a finite many-particle system, Physical Review, Volume 132, 1963, pp. 1326-1342
  • with A. Klein: Collective motion in finite many particle systems, Part 2, Phys. Rev., Volume 138, 1965, pp. B 1323-1323, part 3 with L. Celenza, Volume 140, 1964, B 234-263
  • Pairing forces and nuclear collective motion, Annals of Physics, Volume 12, 1961, pp. 300–329.
  • with Herman Feshbach : Nuclear forces 1–3, Comm. Nucl. Part. Phys., 1967/68
  • with de Toledo: Studies in isobaric analog resonances, 2 parts, Annals of Physics, Volume 43, 1967, pp. 363-381, Volume 48, 1968, pp. 173-194
  • with H. Feshbach, RH Lemmer: Intermediate structure and doorway states in nuclear reactions, Annals of Physics, Volume 41, 1967, pp. 230-286.
  • with CN Bressel, B. Rouben: Soft-core nucleon-nucleon potential, Nuclear Physics, Section A, Volume 124, 1969, pp. 624-636.
  • with D. Tuerpe, WH Bassichis: Self-consistent nuclear calculations with a deformed basis, Nuclear Physics, Section A, Volume 142, 1970, pp. 49-62.
  • with WH Bassichis: Self-consistent calculations of shell effects including the proposed island of stability, Physical Review C, Volume 2, 1970, pp. 1768–1776.
  • with Harry Lipkin : Strangeness analog resonances, Annals of Physics, Volume 66, 1971, pp. 738-757.
  • N. Auerbach, Jörg Huefner, CM Shakin: A theory of isobaric analog resonances, Reviews of Modern Physics, Volume 44, 1972, pp. 48-125.
  • with Steven Koonin : Quantum theory of dissipation for nuclear collective motion, Physica Scriptam, Volume 10, 1974, pp. 118-121
  • with S. Koonin: Hamiltonian formulation of time-dependent variational principles for the many-body system, Annals of Physics, Volume 100, 1976, pp. 332-358
  • with H. Feshbach, S. Koonin: Koonin S. The statistical theory of multi-step compound and direct reactions, Annals of Physics, Volume 125, 1980, pp. 429-476.
  • with T. Matsui, B. Svetitsky: Particle production in the central rapidity region of ultrarelativistic nuclear collisions, Physical Review Letters, Volume 56, 1986, pp. 219-222.
  • with NR dagdeviruses: One-gluon exchange and the nuclear strong interaction Nuclear Physics A, Volume 473, 1987, pp. 605-612
  • with G. Gatoff, T. Matsui: Flux-tube model for ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions: Electrohydrodynamics of a quark-gluon plasma, Physical Review D, Volume 36, 1987, pp 114-129.
  • with D. Vautherin, G. Gatoff: Nonlinear effects in the flux-tube model for ultrarelativistic nucleus-nucleus collisions, Physical Review D, Volume 38, 1988, pp. 96-104.
  • with Dominique Vautherin : Variational calculations in gauge theories, Annals of Physics, Volume 192, 1989, pp. 408-420.
  • with MP Pato, MS Hussein: Inverse free electron laser acceleration, Nuclear Inst. and Methods in Physics Research A, Volume 328, 1993, pp. 342-343.
  • with C. Martin, D. Vautherin: model near the critical point: The Gaussian variational approximation, Physical Review D, Volume 47, 1993, pp. 632-639.
  • with CY Lin: Time-Dependent Variational Principle for Field Theory, RPA Approximation and Renormalization, 2 parts, Annals of Physics, Volume 241, 1995, pp. 185-211, Volume 269, 1998, pp. 55-76.
  • with E. Timmermans, P. Tommasini, M. Hussein: Feshbach resonances in atomic Bose-Einstein condensates, Physics Report, Volume 315, 1999, pp 199-230.
  • with GE Cragg: Coherent decay of Bose-Einstein condensates, Physical Review Letters, Volume 98, 2005, p. 080405.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ MN Kreisler, Three decades of interaction with Arthur Kerman , CERN 2012 (pdf)
  2. ↑ Book of Members 1780 – present, Chapter K. (PDF; 670 kB) In: American Academy of Arts and Sciences (amacad.org). Retrieved on August 14, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Kerman, Arthur
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kerman, Arthur K .; Kerman, Arthur Kent
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Canadian-American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH May 3, 1929
PLACE OF BIRTH Montreal
DATE OF DEATH May 11, 2017