Michael S. Moore

Michael S. Moore died on July 22, 2015. Moore was a fellow in the APS and a member of both APS and ANS since 1955. He received his BS, MS and PhD from Rice University and then worked at the Idaho Reactor Testing Station from 1956 to 1968. While there he did research on the Material’s Testing Reactor. During that period, in collaboration with Dr. Charles Reich, he developed the “Reich-Moore Formalism” which is used actively to this day in evaluating fission and capture in neutron resonances. In 1968 he moved to the Los Alamos National Laboratory where he continued his work measuring nuclear cross sections. During his career there he was instrumental in building the Weapons Nuclear Research facility, after which he worked for many years as the shot-physicist for LANL at the Nevada Test site. He was also a member of the National Cross Sections Advisory Committee as well as the International Cross Sections Advisory Committee. In 1967 he served as a visiting Professor at RPI in Troy, NY. In 1978 he lectured at the Trieste Institute for Nuclear Physics and in 1979-80, he collaborated at the Belgium Nuclear Research Centre. During the course of his career he became known for the determination of spins of resonances in the important interaction of neutrons with uranium-235. He also worked in the measurement of the fission cross section of the isomeric, excited state of uranium-235 which lasts 26 minutes (half-life). Additionally he was involved in the use of a lead slowing-down spectrometer for measuring the fission cross sections of extremely small samples, measuring rare isotopes of 236Np, 238Np, 232Pa, 247Cm, 250Cf and 254Es. After his retirement from LANL in 1993, he worked for Sumner Associate where he worked as an archivist for nuclear data at the lab.