Gerald T. Garvey

Gerald T. Garvey, a renowned nuclear physicist, passed away on 14 November 2024. Over the years, Gerry had many physics interests, including the role of isospin in nuclei, weak interactions in nuclei, and the properties and interactions of neutrinos. In addition to being a professor, he served in many positions in science administration during his career. He was a well-known and loved mentor to many students and early-career physicists, and he was awarded the American Physical Society Division of Nuclear Physics Mentoring Award in 2011.

Gerry was born in New York City on 21 January 1935. He grew up in Hartford, Connecticut, and attended Fairfield University, where he earned a BS in physics. He received a PhD from Yale in 1962 and performed postdoctoral work at Yale University before becoming an assistant professor at Princeton University in 1965. In these early years, he is best known for his work on the Garvey–Kelson mass relation that enabled predictions of unknown nuclear masses based on nearby known values.

He remained at Princeton, where he became full professor in 1970, until 1976. During this period, Gerry became the lead investigator at the Princeton Cyclotron Laboratory and had a major influence on a younger generation of nuclear physicists. He developed an active program in the study of the weak interaction using nuclear beta decay. Particularly notable were studies of weak magnetism as a test of conserved vector currents and limits on the contributions of second-class currents.

In 1976, Gerry transitioned to Argonne National Laboratory as director of the physics division and later assumed the role of associate laboratory director. He also held an appointment as professor at the University of Chicago. During that period, he oversaw the construction and initial operation of the Argonne Tandem Linac Accelerator facility, ATLAS, which utilized novel superconducting linac technology and remains an important facility for nuclear structure studies to this day.

In 1984, Gerry moved to Los Alamos, where he served as the director of the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility, LAMPF, until 1990. During this time, he was instrumental in advancing neutrino physics at LAMPF and initiating the Los Alamos effort on the Soviet American Gallium Experiment, SAGE, in Baksan, Russia.

In 1990, he became a senior fellow at Los Alamos and focused his efforts on physics research. This began with the Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector (LSND) at LAMPF to search for neutrino oscillations from the LAMPF beam stop. The experiment detected a 4-sigma excess of events that is still not understood to date. The excess does not fit with the standard three-neutrino oscillation formalism as now established by many other experiments, and it might be an indication of the production of sterile neutrinos.

LSND was followed up by the MiniBooNe experiment at Fermilab, and Gerry was an important contributor to that effort. Gerry established himself as the resident expert in the collaboration on neutrino nucleus interactions, cheerfully enlightening his particle physics colleagues in the role of short-range correlations and meson exchange current effects. Gerry also proposed an experiment at Fermilab, E866, to measure the antiquark flavor structure of the nucleon using the Drell–Yan process. That experiment successfully measured the asymmetry between up and down antiquarks and explained the violation of the Gottfried sum rule previously observed by the NMC collaboration at CERN.

During the period 1994–96, Gerry served as assistant director for physical science and engineering at the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House. He also served as chair of the division of nuclear physics of the American Physical Society.

Gerry had a sharp and charming wit, and he always had a twinkle in his eye. His physics knowledge was greatly appreciated by all who knew him, and many sought his advice over the years. He will be truly missed by many colleagues and friends.

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