Don Robson

Our colleague Don Robson passed away 18 December 2022 after having a severe stroke in September 2022.

Don was born on 19 March 1937 in Leeds, England. He and his family immigrated to Melbourne, Australia, in December 1949. As a teenager, Don took up chess and in 1954 became the Australian Junior Chess Champion. He also loved playing rugby and, like all young Australian men, went through Army basic training. He received his BSc in 1959, MSc in 1961, and PhD in 1963 from the University of Melbourne. His MSc worked out the formalism for nuclear transfer reactions, and for his PhD he developed one of the first computer codes to carry out these calculations.

He obtained a Fulbright Fellowship in 1963, which he used to come to Florida State University (FSU). He gave up a very promising career in professional chess to come to FSU, but he continued to play throughout his life here in Tallahassee, and he continued to play golf, which he had taken up before migrating to Australia. In Tallahassee he took up daily running and did this into his 70s.

Upon coming to FSU, he was shown data on resonance reactions that John Fox and his students had taken that exploited the extremely precise beam characteristics of the newly commissioned tandem Van de Graaff accelerator. It was suggested that these sharp resonances might be a result of populating isobaric analog states whose structure could be related to the single particle nature of nuclear states. Don proposed and immediately worked out a theory that showed that these sharp resonances might be observable in proton scattering from a medium mass nucleus.

When Fox and students took the data, these single particle structures were indeed observed. However, referees recommended rejecting the paper because it was well known that the proton scattering would be structureless; the FSU group had made some mistake, they said. No group had really exploited the precise beam capabilities of a tandem accelerator, and no data had ever been taken of the type as was done at FSU. A few months after working feverishly experimentally and with Don developing the theory, Fox and Don gave a talk on their work at a meeting of the American Physical Society, which resulted in a group at Argonne led by John Schiffer confirming the FSU result.

Upon submitting the work for publication and having the paper accepted by Physics Letters, John Schiffer called Fox and Don to ask why he hadn’t seen their paper; they explained that they were having trouble getting theirs published. Schiffer then said he would request that the Argonne paper not appear until after the FSU work. The publication of the FSU paper by Fox, Moore (graduate student), and Don was followed by detailed theory work by Don, both of which led to a huge effort around the world to exploit this new tool for probing the single particle structure of nuclei.

As a result of Don’s original theory development, he was asked to join the FSU physics faculty in 1964. While a requirement of the Fulbright Fellowship was that the holder would return to their home country, negotiations between FSU and the Fulbright Foundation allowed Don to stay in the US. After one year (1964–65) as an assistant professor, Don was promoted to associate professor (1965–67) and then full professor with tenure (1967).

FSU organized an international conference in Tallahassee in March 1966 that attracted more than 150 nuclear physicists from around the world. It resulted in the publication by Academic Press of a compendium of works edited by Fox and Don that showed the power of this resonance technique for understanding the basics of the strong nuclear force. While it is hard to estimate the impact of this conference on the research profile of FSU, it was one of the events that resulted in the university receiving in 1967 an NSF Center of Excellence Grant, the purpose of which was to build strength on strength. This funding allowed the purchase of a new tandem Van de Graaff that could go to much higher energies and is still in use today.

As a result of his work on the theory of isobaric analogue states, Don was invited to many places around the world to both lecture and do collaborative research. Among those were Visiting Scientist, Theoretical Physics Division, Atomic Energy Research Establishment, Harwell, England (1965); Visiting Lecturer, University of Melbourne (1967); Visiting Lecturer, Indian Academy of Sciences (1968); Visiting Scientist, Brookhaven National Laboratory (1970); Visiting Professor, Princeton University (1971–72); Visiting Professor, University of Frankfurt (1972); Visiting Senior Scientist, Oxford University (1976); Visiting Professor, Physics Section, University of Munich (1967–68).

In 1972 Don was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society, a rare honor for such a young physicist. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, there were very few national physics prizes in the US, so it was an extreme recognition in 1972 when Don won the American Physical Society’s Bonner Nuclear Physics Prize for his theoretical work along with J. D. Anderson of Livermore, who had pursued a type of reaction experimentally that led to the John Fox resonance discovery. Their Bonner citation reads: “For their contributions to the discovery and understanding of analog states in complex nuclei. This work has greatly extended the applicability of the concept of isospin symmetry, offered new insights into nuclear dynamics, and provided a new conceptual tool for the analysis of the structure of nuclear states.”

Don’s future contributions to nuclear theory were many, including developing a technique for computing heavy-ion induced nucleon transfer reaction probabilities, explaining the very anomalous features found in the scattering between closed-shell nuclei, and looking at the possibility of developing nuclear structure based on the underlying quark components of protons and neutrons. A running joke during the development of the theory to understand heavy-ion reactions was Don saying, “It is all worked out in my MSc thesis,” upon which we would ask what was left for him to do to get a PhD. His deep understanding of physics resulted in the community seeking his input into its future direction through his service from 1972 to 1975 as a member of the Executive Committee, Division of Nuclear Physics, American Physical Society.

In the late 1970s it became obvious to the federal research funding agencies that it was not possible to fund all the proposed experimental facilities the community wanted. They formed the US Nuclear Science Advisory Committee (NSAC), on which Don served from 1978 to 1982. NSAC proposed the construction of a multi-GeV electron accelerator for probing the quark structure of nuclei. As is normal, the management of a facility such as this was bid out. A group known as the Southeastern Universities Research Association provided the winning bid, and Don served on its Board from 1990 to 2003 and was its chair from 1996 to 1998. This facility, now known as Jefferson Laboratory, continues to produce world-leading science, with FSU having a major group doing experiments there.

At FSU, Don served on many university committees, especially those that developed local supercomputing capabilities as well as the use of super mini computers for theoretical calculations. He served as chair of the Department of Physics from 1985 to 1991, a time when the faculty grew from 28 to 39. In 1990 he was named a Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor, an honor that is given to only one FSU professor per year. He retired from the active faculty in 2008, but until his passing he continued to provide research guidance to new generations of graduate students and faculty during coffee sessions in the Nuclear Research Building.

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