George H. Rawitscher
With great sorrow we report the passing of our long-time colleague and friend, George Rawitscher, on 10 March after a brief illness. He had just celebrated his 90th birthday with a cake at a University of Connecticut physics department meeting.
George was born in Freiburg, Germany on 27 February 1928. In 1934 his father, Felix Rawitscher, who was Jewish, brought his family—George’s mother, Charlotte Oberlander, sister Erika, and George—from Freiburg to Brazil to escape the Nazis. Felix established and chaired the botany department, which still bears his name, at the University of São Paulo. George grew up there. Early on, he knew he wanted to be a physicist, and he taught himself quantum mechanics from a book during high school. After graduating in physics and mathematics from the University of São Paulo in 1949, he served as instructor at the Brazilian Center for Physical Research in Rio de Janiero, receiving a Brazilian National Research Council Fellowship. At the Center, he worked with Richard Feynman, who was then a visiting professor. George’s grandson Nicholas reports that Feynman made a big impact on George, observing that he had the potential to become a “real” physicist.
George then went to Stanford as a graduate student in theoretical nuclear physics and mathematics, receiving his PhD in 1956 for a study of Fierz–Pauli spin 3/2 particles and the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon, under Leonard Schiff and D.R. Yennie. His first paper studied the effect of the finite size of the nucleus on muon pair production by gamma rays. At Stanford, George met and later married Mary Adams, a fellow Stanford student, and they proudly raised two sons, Peter and Henry. Mary, a biochemist, died in 1980. In later years, George was again happily married to Joyce Rawitscher, who passed away in 2016.
Rawitscher was instructor at the Physics Nuclear Structure Center (University of Rochester) for two years and then joined the Yale physics department as instructor and assistant professor, doing research in collaboration with the formidable Gregory Breit and remaining there until 1964. He then joined the physics department at the University of Connecticut in Storrs as an associate professor before becoming professor of physics in 1972. He remained at UConn after “retiring” in 2009 as emeritus research professor. He continued active research in nuclear physics, computational physics, and ultracold atomic collision physics until days before his death.
George’s academic honors included an early research fellowship award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany) in 1964. He became a fellow of the American Physical Society, nominated by the Division of Nuclear Physics, in 2016.
While at the University of Connecticut, George took academic leaves at the Max Planck Institut fuer Kernphysik in Heidelberg (1964–66), the Laboratory for Nuclear Science at MIT (1972), the University of Surrey, England (1973), and the University of Maryland (1987–88). He served on the board of directors of the Bates Users Theory Group at MIT (1982–85) and the Executive Committee of the American Physical Society Topical Group on Few Body Systems and Multi-Particle Dynamics (1993–95). He gave a number of invited presentations in nuclear theory at conferences, publishing approximately 88 refereed papers plus numerous conference proceedings.
George’s research involved scattering problems using nonlocal optical models of nuclear processes, coupled-channel reaction mechanisms for nuclear breakup (such as the [e,e’p] reaction), and virtual nuclear excitations. Recently he emphasized development of numerical methods such as the Galerkin and spectral expansions for solving integral equations, applying these recently to studies of ultracold atomic collisions. Recent papers (2015–17) concerned “Revival of the phase-amplitude description of a quantum-mechanical wave function.”
George was an engaged and untiring participant, both in his department and in the general community up to his last moments. Promoting public awareness and activism on ameliorating global climate change, he and his wife Joyce were active in the peace movement. A member of the Storrs, Connecticut Quaker Meeting, he was active in community service, for example serving on the Town of Mansfield Sustainability Committee. He summarized his lifelong expertise in numerical computational physics in a nearly-finished book, under contract with Springer, with two younger coauthors from Brazil. A dedicated and effective undergraduate teacher and empathetic mentor to many graduate students, colleagues, and collaborators, he gave greatly to the Physics Department for more than 50 years, earning a special place in our hearts. George’s inspiring example will be very much missed at the University and by his colleagues, family, and many friends.
