SPIN-ORBIT COUPLING IN NUCLEI EXPLANATION OF THE MAGIC NUMBERS

For those of you who are not familiar with this term, I regret not having time to go into it in more detail here. At the time, it was a stab in the dark. No independent evidence for or against it. But to Maria Mayer's great joy, with this spin-orbit coupling added to the potential, everything clicked beautifully, i.e. the magic numbers 2,8,20,28,50,82, and 126 were accounted for, and she immediately started to work out the consequences for nuclear properties, such as ground state angular momenta, magnetic moments, etc. That's where I came in. In 1949, having survived the rather draconian qualifying exams at the University of Chicago, I started my research with Maria Mayer on beta and gamma decays, another application of the shell model. My philosophy was to take the idea of independent particle motion for granted, and help to work out the consequences. By the way, Hans Jensen, who independently found the spin-orbit coupling, as explanation for the magic numbers, told me later that he got the idea one day while shaving. So Mayer and Jensen got together, and wrote a book on the nuclear shell model which was published in 1955. And eight years later, they shared the Nobel Prize for their work. That could be the end of the story, and, strictly speaking, for Maria Mayer it was. In her later years she was not well, and no longer so active in nuclear physics. The last time I saw her was in 1965, and at that time, I was very excited about an idea which was an outgrowth of her third contribution to the nuclear shell model.

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