James Philip Elliott

James Philip "Phil" Elliott (born July 27, 1929 in Gosport , † October 21, 2008 in Lewes ) was a British theoretical nuclear physicist .

Elliott studied at the University of Southampton , where he graduated in physics in 1949 and received his doctorate in theoretical nuclear physics under Hermann Arthur Jahn . From 1951 he was in the theory department of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment in Harwell. He first worked on neutron transport in reactors before turning to the core structure. In cooperation with the head of the theory department Brian Flowers , fundamental work was carried out in the 1950s that contributed to uniting the shell model with collective models of the core structure. In particular, they examined the structure of light nuclei (oxygen, fluorine). He spent a year at the University of Rochester and was professor at the University of Sussex from 1962 , where he retired in 1994, but remained scientifically active until his death. From 1979 to 1984 he was dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Science.

Elliott was a pioneer in the application of group theory to nuclear physics with work on the application of the SU (3) group in the theory of nuclear structure in 1958. He also wrote a monograph on group theory applications in physics. He later developed interaction matrix elements for nuclear structure calculations (for example with Hartree-Fock methods) at the University of Sussex, which were derived from scattering matrix elements of free nucleons and which became known as Sussex Matrix Elements . In the 1980s he dealt with the Interacting Boson Model and its justification in the shell theory

In 1980 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society and in 1994 he received the Rutherford Medal of the Institute of Physics . In 2002 he and Francesco Iachello received the Lise Meitner Prize of the European Physical Society.

He was married to Mavis Avery and had a son and a daughter. His hobbies were opera and gardening.

Fonts

• with Peter Geoffrey Dawber Symmetry in Physics , 2 volumes, Macmillan 1979.

Web links

• P. van Isacker The scientific legacy of JP Elliott , pdf
• Obituary in the Guardian by Tony Evans, Jan. 21, 2009
• Obituary at the University of Sussex