2005 Seaborg Award: Luciano G. Moretto

Award Statement C&EN (pages 3-4)

In 1971, Moretto returned to Berkeley permanently and focused on the study of nuclear reactions. He spent the 1970s inducing fission with high-energy particles to determine, he says, how the shell structure “slowly fades away” with increasing energy. This work led to influential papers on nuclear level densities with John R. Huizenga.

In the late 1970s and the 1980s, Moretto’s group studied deep-inelastic collisions between heavy nuclei. The group studied how energy and angular momentum relax from translational to internal motion.

More recently Moretto’s group was able to interpret multifragmentation in terms of a liquid-vapor phase diagram. “It turns out that nuclear matter does behave very much like a van der Waals fluid,” he says. He says this work “closed the circle” on his career in chemistry because of his familiarity with phase diagrams as a young university student working endlessly in a lab. “All of a sudden, we took the world of nuclear physics into a more mundane and human frame of understanding,” he says.