Session C6: Invited Session: Maria Goeppert Mayer: The 50th Anniversary of Her Nobel Prize

Maria Goeppert Mayer's work on beta-decay and pairing, and its relevance today

Maria Goeppert Mayer's work on beta-decay and pairing is not as well known as her Nobel Prize winning work on the nuclear shell model, but it attests to her wide range of accomplishments. Her paper on double beta decay was the first one written on the subject. Later she also worked on the application of beta decay as a test of the nuclear shell model. Due to its very long half-life, double beta-decay was not found experimentally until the 1980's. This involves emission of two neutrinos along with the two electrons. However, in principle it is also possible to have double beta decay with no neutrinos, a process which was identified about 10 years ago, though this is still quite controversial. Currently, there are several groups working on this problem, which has significant implications for particle physics and for cosmology. It was known from the earliest days of nuclear physics that nuclei with even Z and even N are more stable than others due to the pairing effect. Indeed, all nuclei in which double beta-decay is looked for are even-even and this would not be possible were it not for pairing. In MGM's paper on pairing, published shortly after the ones on the magic numbers and role of spin-orbit coupling, she used a very simplified zero range nuclear interaction. There has been considerable work on pairing in the meantime. It is still an open problem how to understand the details of how pairing works in nuclei, in terms of realistic nucleon-nucleon interactions.   

Maria Goeppert Mayer and the Nobel Prize

When Maria Goeppert Mayer was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963, she was only the second woman to receive that award and there have been no additional female physics laureates since. Mayer was uniquely prepared to carry out her prize-winning work on the nuclear shell model. Furthermore, she worked with some of the most well-known figures in mid-twentieth century physics, and her award came at a time when American science was in ascendance. Why, then, is her name so little known beyond the physics community? There are several possible answers to this question, ranging from the personal (her modest reaction to public acclaim) and the scientific (the mathematically abstract nature of her prize-winning work), to the national (the nature of the issues commanding public attention in the 1960s). In this talk I will present an overview of the circumstances that enabled Mayer to make exceptional contributions to nuclear physics, and then examine some of the possible reasons why her exceptional status is not more widely known.   

Remembrances of Maria Goeppert Mayer and the Nuclear Shell Model.

Maria Goeppert Mayer received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 for her work on the nuclear shell model. I knew her in my teens as a close ``friend of the family.'' The Mayers lived a few blocks away in Leonia, New Jersey from 1939 to 1945, across the street in Chicago from 1945 to 1958 and about one mile away in La Jolla, CA from 1960 till her death. Maria held primarily ``vol'' (voluntary) positions during this period, although in Chicago she was half time at Argonne National Laboratory as a Senior Physicist. She joined the University of California at San Diego as a professor in 1960, her first full-time academic position. I will discuss her positive impact on a teenager seriously considering becoming a physicist. I will also discuss briefly the impact of her work on our understanding of the structure of nuclei. Maria Mayer was creative, well educated, with a supportive father and husband, but she was foreign , received her Ph D at the time of the Great Depression, and was one of the few women trained in physics. Her unusual career and her great success is due to her love of physics and her ability as a theoretical physicist.