Virginia Ruth Brown

Abstract

Virginia Ruth Brown died on 8 February 2016 in Chevy Chase, Maryland, after a long battle with cancer. She was a wonderful colleague, friend, and distinguished theoretical nuclear physicist. During her long career, Virginia made important contributions to our understanding of the nucleon–nucleon interaction, nuclear reaction theory, and nuclear structure, among other accomplishments. She loved physics and had a deep commitment to getting to the heart of things.Virginia Ruth BrownPPT|High resolutionBorn on 11 March 1934 in Massachusetts, Virginia received her PhD, under the supervision of Bernard Margolis, from McGill University in 1964. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University and then worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) from 1964 until 1995. She was an NSF program officer for nuclear theory from 1995 to 1998. Following that, she was a visiting professor in the physics department of the University of Maryland in College Park and a visiting scientist in the Laboratory for Nuclear Science at MIT.During Virginia’s early work on nucleon–nucleon bremsstrahlung, she explored the effects of parity nonconservation and demonstrated the importance of meson exchange in neutron–proton bremsstrahlung. Her calculations showed that meson exchange currents contributed a factor of 2 and were not dominated by one-pion exchange. Throughout her career she continued refining and extending her calculations, including for relativistic effects and noncoplanarity. She compared her results with experiment, most notably with the data on neutron–proton bremsstrahlung that Stephen Wender, June Matthews, and their colleagues obtained at the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center. When Virginia was at MIT she interacted frequently with Matthews’s group and directed the research of several of Matthews’s undergraduate and graduate students.Virginia’s collaboration with experimentalists started soon after she joined LLNL; most prominently, she worked with John Anderson on charge-exchange reactions in nuclei.Around 1973 Virginia also began her long partnership with theorist Victor Madsen. They developed the nuclear-structure and reaction theory needed to understand charge-exchange reactions; their breakthroughs included a model for mixing giant resonance states with the low-lying states that had been experimentally observed at the time. Their most important contribution was the systematic inclusion of isospin degrees of freedom that were required to understand the data. It was successfully applied to inelastic scattering processes without any additional modifications.One of us (Bernstein) remembers how stimulating it was to work with Virginia. In the mid 1970s, he received a letter from her about how Madsen’s and her isospin-dependence calculations could explain the puzzles and regularities that he had observed in inelastic alpha-particle scattering. Their collaboration started in their first meeting, and over many years it yielded a productive series of papers. They covered electromagnetic tests of the accuracy of the observed neutron and proton transition matrix elements and their observation using different hadronic probes and electromagnetic methods such as electron scattering and Coulomb excitation. He remembers with great pleasure his annual spring-break trip to the University of California, Berkeley, and LLNL to work with Virginia and to enjoy great dinners with her in Berkeley and San Francisco. Their friendship and collaboration were reinforced while she was working as a visiting scientist at MIT from 1998 until her death.Virginia was a deeply involved member of the American Physical Society (APS), including as secretary/treasurer of the division of nuclear physics (DNP) from 1986 to 1995. Because of her numerous contributions, her colleagues chose her in 2003 to receive the division’s first Distinguished Service Award.Another of us (Gibson) saw firsthand Virginia’s remarkable contributions to APS. He first met Virginia when he was a postdoctoral fellow at LLNL in 1968. Their closest connection came through the DNP, when he succeeded her as secretary/treasurer in 1995, and she mentored him in that time-consuming position.Virginia’s efforts as part of the DNP leadership strengthened the division’s fall meetings, assisted in funding APS’s Hans Bethe and Herman Feshbach Prizes and the division’s Nuclear Physics Dissertation Award, initiated the Department of Energy and NSF’s Nuclear Science Advisory Committee Long Range Plan town meetings, and established the DNP archive and historical record.While at NSF, Virginia suggested exploring a joint meeting with the nuclear physicists of the Physical Society of Japan. She chaired the first of the resulting series of successful international physics meetings in 2001 and remained instrumental in their success through the 2014 joint meeting. After Virginia left NSF, she was a visiting scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where she conducted research and shared meals with Gibson and another of us (Seestrom). During one visit, she and Gibson drafted a history of the DNP. Virginia’s imprint on the division is indelible, and the DNP owes her a great debt of gratitude.With her contagious enthusiasm and laughter, Virginia was a dear friend who will be sorely missed.© 2016 American Institute of Physics.