1981 Seaborg Award: Robert Vandenbosch

Award Statement C&EN (Page 10)

Vandenbosch received his Ph.D. in 1957 at the University of California, Berkeley; his research was carried out under the direction of Glenn T. Seaborg.

He has made many fundamental contributions to the field of nuclear fission. For in stance, he developed a theory based on the deformation of the fission fragments near fission, which ex plains many results of fission in a consistent and simple way.

The award winner was the first to apply accelerator beam pulsing and coincident solid-state detector methods to discover and study fission isomers. This research helped lead to the establishment of the two-humped fission barrier and the mapping out of the structure of the barrier as a function of atomic charge and mass.

He has pioneered the use of sequential fission to probe both the magnitude and the alignment of the angular momentum transferred to the heavy fragment in quasi- and deeply inelastic collisions. It has been shown that both the transferred angular momentum and its alignment increase with increasing inelasticity in the collision, and a simple model to explain this result has been developed.