1984 Seaborg Award: Joseph Cerny

Award Statement C&EN (page 3)

Cerny received a B.S. in chemical engineering at the University of Mississippi in 1957, and graduated with a Ph.D. in nuclear chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1961.

Cerny recognized the potential importance of multinucleon transfer reactions for nuclear spectroscopic purposes and the investigation of high isospin multiplets. He developed a novel particle identifier for mass analysis of very-low-yield nuclear reaction products. Subsequent research led to the observation of decay channels that provided new tests of isobaric spin conservation, and to the discovery of many exotic light nuclei on the limits of stability.

Cerny also discovered proton decay, which added a fourth mode of radioactive decay to the three previously known—alpha decay, beta decay, and spontaneous fission. His most recent discovery, hailed as “exciting” by a colleague, is of two-proton emission following beta particle decay for the new isotopes ²²A1 and ²⁶P. This decay process had been predicted theoretically but never observed experimentally.