Carl M. Shakin

Carl M. Shakin, a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, a leading scholar in relativistic theories of nuclear structure and nuclear reactions, and an American Physical Society Fellow, passed away on February 20, 2016 in Cockeysville, Maryland.

Born in the Bronx, New York on February 17, 1934, Carl graduated from the renowned Bronx High School of Science and attended New York University College of Engineering, where he received his BS in 1955. From 1955 to 1956, he was a Fulbright Fellow, visiting the University of Manchester, Manchester, England. He completed graduate studies at Harvard University, earning his MA in 1957, and his PhD in 1961, both in theoretical nuclear physics. As a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, Carl conducted theoretical nuclear physics research at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark from 1963 to 1964 and at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at Oxford University, Oxford, England from 1964 to 1965.

Carl joined Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an Assistant Professor in 1965, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 1967. In this period Carl tackled various difficult aspects of nuclear structure, among others, short-range correlations in nuclei and Hartree-Fock calculations with singular potentials. In 1970 he joined the nuclear theory group at Case Western Reserve University, where Carl and his colleagues published an impressive amount of works pertinent to nuclear reaction theories, including a rigorous reformulation of the formal scattering theory for non-Hermitian interactions. This new formulation is of great importance to the analysis of nuclear reactions with the use of optical potentials. In 1973 Carl moved to New York City and began his academic career in the Department of Physics, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York at the rank of Professor.

With the advent of various world meson physics facilities in the nineteen seventies, Carl started the pioneering work of developing a covariant pion-nucleus scattering theory. Later, he expanded the relativistic approach to include the negative-energy component of nucleon in nucleus, as required by the Dirac theory. Carl succeeded in developing a Relativistic Bruckner-Hartree-Fock theory and a relativistic optical model. A remarkable feature of the theory is that it contains no adjustable parameters at the nuclear level. All the parameters appearing in the theory are those introduced in fitting free-space nucleon-nucleon scattering data and are left unchanged when calculating nuclear properties and nucleon-nucleus scattering. Carl was equally prolific in QCD-related research and was highly interested in exploring the impact of QCD on nuclear physics. His research encompassed but not limited to the areas of partial restoration of chiral symmetry in nuclear matter, quark condensate at finite baryon density, correlators in the nonperturbative domain, meson spectra and meson mixing. In recognition of his outstanding contributions to the intersections of nuclear and particle physics, he was honored with the title of Distinguished Professor in 1986, an esteemed academic position only held by a few faculty members in the history of City University of New York. By 2005, he had co-authored more than 200 publications and one book (with L.S. Celenza) on Relativistic Nuclear Physics: Theories of Structure and Scattering. Carl was invited to present his works world-wide in Canada, China, Switzerland, Taiwan, Poland, and Germany.

Carl was an excellent advisor to his graduate students in their thesis studies. In research collaborations, he was very receptive to any new ideas coming from his collaborators. Indeed, collaboration with Carl was always an experience of accomplishment with excitement. Carl’s warm personality gave his colleagues and collaborators tremendous pleasure in discussions with him on topics ranging from physics to everyday life. Besides physics, Carl enjoyed the theater and restaurants in New York City. He loved to read novels, books on historical events, and scientific essays. In his retirement since 2004, he took every opportunity to ask those who called him about the latest developments in their fields.

Carl left behind two daughters, Elisabeth Kunkel and Susan Eshleman, and four grandchildren. The Carl Shakin Memorial Fund has been established by the family through the Brooklyn College Foundation to carry forward Carl’s devotion to science and education. The physics community, Carl’s colleagues, family, and friends everywhere will miss him and remember, in particular, his important contributions to theoretical nuclear physics.