Bent Herskind

Bent Herskind (born December 14, 1931 in Copenhagen ) is a Danish experimental nuclear physicist.

Herskind had been a research assistant at the Niels Bohr Institute (NBI) in Copenhagen since 1956 . There he developed electronics for experiments on the Van de Graaff accelerator and then on the tandem accelerator (TAL, then NBITAL). In 1966 he became a senior scientist ( Amanuensis ) at the NBI. In 1966/67 he was on a research stay at the University of Wisconsin – Madison . In 1990 he became a lecturer at the NBI and in 2002 he officially retired from the NBI, but remained scientifically active.

Together with Peter Twin, he developed the TESSA detector (Escape Suppression Detector), which is used to observe the gamma ray cascades of highly excited, rapidly rotating nuclei. For this purpose, the emitted gamma quanta must be registered as completely as possible, which requires as many detectors as possible arranged in a spherical shape around the target (ball arrangement). TESSA was at NBI from 1980 and the further developments TESSA 1 to 3 in Daresbury . Later he was involved in NORDBALL (1985–1998, NBI) and EUROBALL (EB) and was a member of the board of directors from 1989 to 1992 and 1997 and from 1993 to 1996 of the group for data analysis of the EB experiments.

He investigated, among other things, the giant dipole resonance in hot (i.e. highly excited) nuclei, damping of rotational and collective excitations in warm nuclei, super-deformed nuclei and nuclei with even more exotic shapes.

In 1971 he became a professor at the NBI. In 1974 he received his doctorate (Ph. D.) from the University of Copenhagen . In 1990 he received an honorary doctorate from Lund University . In 1990 he became a member of the Danish Academy of Sciences.

He was co-editor of Hyperfine Interaction, Zeitschrift für Physik A (from 1985 to 1995) and its successor European Physics Journal A (until 1997). In the 1980s he was a consultant at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory . He was visiting professor at the laboratories in Chalk River, Canada in 1975 and at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 1982 and 1987 .

In 2004 he received the Lise Meitner Prize with Peter J. Twin .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Laudation with biography