Anthony Milner Lane

Abstract

Anthony Milner Lane, one of the leading theoretical nuclear physicists of his generation, died from cancer at his home in Oxford, UK, on 9 February 2011. From the 1950s to the 1970s he made many significant advances in the theories and understanding of nuclear reactions and structure.Tony was born in Trowbridge, UK, on 27 July 1928, and in 1946 he was awarded a grant to attend Selwyn College at Cambridge University, where he graduated in mathematics in 1949 and physics in 1950. Although he began his research in nuclear physics at Cambridge for his PhD, he completed it at Birmingham University under Rudolf Peierls, one of the innovators of nuclear science. His thesis was entitled “The Application of the Shell Model to Nuclear Reactions.” Tony joined the theoretical physics division at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment in Harwell, which spearheaded nuclear science research in the UK. At the time, the division employed many talented physicists, including Tony Skyrme of skyrmion fame, John Hubbard, and John Bell, known for the hidden-variable theorem.During the 1950s and subsequent years, Harwell had many reactors and particle accelerators, and Tony soon revealed a talent for interpreting the data obtained from nuclear reactions induced by neutrons and charged particles. He rapidly became an expert in theories of both nuclear reactions and nuclear structure. He was invited by Victor Weisskopf to spend 1954–55 at MIT, and while there he took time to visit Princeton University to work with Eugene Wigner and Robert Thomas. In 1956 he collaborated with Thomas at Los Alamos National Laboratory and in 1957 visited Oak Ridge National Laboratory. For Reviews of Modern Physics, he wrote an article in 1957 on nuclear reactions, and in 1958 he and Thomas wrote a definitive review of the rigorous R-matrix theory of resonances; it became one of the journal’s most cited reviews ever published.In nuclear structure, Tony collaborated with J. Philip Elliott in 1958 to write about the nuclear shell model in an extensive article that makes many comparisons with nuclear data. Tony was unconventional for a theorist in that he examined experimental literature and noted in a “little black book” unusual observational features that he couldn’t understand from existing theory. Those notes enabled him to develop new theories and identify new nuclear states—mainly collective states of nuclei and isobaric analogue states—seen in nuclear reactions. With Eric Lynn and other Harwell colleagues, Tony made significant advances in 1959–60 in the theory of nucleon-capture reactions and in 1964 discovered the importance of a two-stage mechanism in which the initial nuclear excitation of a giant dipole state greatly enhances subsequent photon emission.Tony was in great demand abroad for lectures and consulting, and he spent many extended periods away from Harwell at numerous institutions, including several universities in the US, the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in India, the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, and universities in Australia and South Africa.In the early 1980s, Tony took up atomic theory related to the separation of isotopes by laser light. His several fundamental contributions included a 1986 proof that the multichannel quantum defect theory of atomic physics could be straightforwardly derived from R-matrix theory. Until his retirement from Harwell in 1989, he also worked on theories on the formation of meso-molecules related to the possibility of muon-catalyzed fusion. His more than 100 publications included the widely used textbook Nuclear Theory: Pairing Force Correlations and Collective Motion (W. A. Benjamin, 1964). He never had an interest in working in an administrative post.Tony was a very kind person and a great family man. He endured some major illnesses, including tuberculosis, heart disease, and cancer, but he never let those setbacks quash his interest in work and enjoyment of life. A lifelong hiker, he enjoyed long walks wherever he happened to be living. In 1954, for instance, he made a day trip down and up the Grand Canyon. A snowstorm near the top exhausted his resources, and he was rescued on horseback by the local sheriff, at a cost of $25. And when he visited his in-laws in Israel, they shook their heads at the mad Englishman who would go for postprandial hikes in temperatures of 38 ˚C. He will be remembered by his many friends and colleagues as a modest man with a penetrating intellect and with many accomplishments.Anthony Milner LanePPT|High resolution© 2011 American Institute of Physics.