Ben Roy Mottelson

Ben Roy
Mottelson
Year
1974
Subject
Physics
Award
Wetherill
Affiliation
NORDITA (Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics) │ Stockholm, Sweden
Citation
For the theory of collective states of atomic nuclei (with Aage N. Bohr).

Ben Roy Mottelson was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1926. The U.S. Navy sent Mottelson to Purdue University for officers training (V12 program) and he remained there to receive a B.S. degree in 1947. He attended Harvard University to undertake his graduate studies, completing his Ph.D. in 1950. A Sheldon Traveling Fellowship from Harvard University enabled Mottelson to spend a year (1950-51) at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen (later the Niels Bohr Institute). Following this fellowship, he continued to work in Copenhagen for two more years, holding a research position in the CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) theoretical study group. With the founding of the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Atomic Physics in Copenhagen in 1957, he received a position as professor which he still holds today.

In the early 1950s, Mottelson and Aage Bohr together confirmed experimentally the theory worked out by James Rainwater about the structure of the nucleus. The three were awarded the Nobel prize in Physics in 1975 for 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.

Information as of 1975