Ben Roy Mottelson (born July 9, 1926) is a Danish American nuclear physicist. He won the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the non-spherical geometry of atomic nuclei.
Mottelson was born in Chicago, Illinois, and graduated from Lyons Township High School in LaGrange, Illinois. He received a Bachelor's degree from Purdue University in 1947, and a Ph.D. in nuclear physics from Harvard University in 1950.
He moved to Institute for Theoreti...
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Ben Roy Mottelson (born July 9, 1926) is a Danish American nuclear physicist. He won the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the non-spherical geometry of atomic nuclei.
Mottelson was born in Chicago, Illinois, and graduated from Lyons Township High School in LaGrange, Illinois. He received a Bachelor's degree from Purdue University in 1947, and a Ph.D. in nuclear physics from Harvard University in 1950.
He moved to Institute for Theoretical Physics (later the Niels Bohr Institute) in Copenhagen on the Sheldon Traveling Fellowship from Harvard, and remained in Denmark, becoming a professor at the newly-formed Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics (Nordita) in 1957. In 1971 he became a naturalized Danish citizen.
In 1950-51, James Rainwater and Aage Bohr had developed models of the atomic nucleus which began to take into account the behaviour of the individual nucleons. These models, which moved beyond the simpler liquid drop treatment of the nucleus as having effectively no...
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