2003 Seaborg Award: Demetrios G. Sarantites

If there’s one area of chemistry that requires heavy instrumental artillery, it’s nuclear chemistry. To probe an atom’s guts, scientists need accelerators to split or fuse nuclei and blast them into new energy states. And a whole science of sophisticated detector systems arose from the need to examine the complex trails of gamma rays spit out by rapidly spinning and highly excited (hot) nuclei.

Over the past several decades, chemistry professor Demetrios G. Sarantites, at Washington University, in St. Louis, has invented some of the most important such detectors used by nuclear scientists. And thanks to these instruments, not only has Sarantites himself been able to gain major insights into nuclear structures and processes, but hosts of other scientists have been able to make important discoveries as well.

Sarantites was born in 1933 in Athens, Greece. He received a B.S. in chemical engineering and an M.S. in chemistry from the Technical University of Athens in 1956. After a three-year service at the Greek Naval Academy, he went to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was awarded a Ph.D. in nuclear and inorganic chemistry in 1963.

After postdoc positions at MIT and at Washington University, in 1964, Sarantites became an assistant professor at Washington University, where he has been ever since. Now a full professor, he has also held visiting professorships at the Nobel Institute of Physics in Stockholm; Niels Bohr Institute in Roskilde, Denmark; and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in Berkeley, Calif.

During the 1960s and ’70s, Sarantites pioneered the use of germanium detectors for probing the nuclear structure of medium-sized atoms. In the early 1980s, he was responsible for the creation of the spin spectrometer, a groundbreaking spherical detector array installed at the Holifield Heavy Ion Research Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The spin spectrometer was the first to examine in great detail the gamma ray decay of excited nuclei.

Sarantites soon developed a spherical detector designed to measure the spectra of hydrogen and helium isotopes, known as the Dwarf Ball/Wall. This detector, used in combination with the spin spectrometer, gave scientists the ability to simultaneously monitor particles and gamma rays.

He also collaborated on the powerful, sophisticated Gammasphere detector system, an international project system at LBNL. In the 1990s, Sarantites developed the Microball, another small spherical detector that fit inside the Gammasphere. The two devices combined made for an extremely powerful, selective system. And with it, Sarantites was able to confirm the existence of the then-theorized “island of superdeformation” in rapidly spinning nuclei of around mass 80 and to study them extensively. He was also instrumental in the discovery and study of superdeformation in nuclei of mass 60, and very recently in mass 40.

Sarantites’ latest device is Hercules, a new detector system used with the Gammasphere that can identify trans-lead and trans-actinide fusion products–a task made very difficult by their quick decay into fission products.

Throughout his illustrious 40-year career, Sarantites has also published over 250 papers and presented numerous lectures.–ELIZABETH WILSON