Nina Byers

January 19, 1930-June 5, 2014

Professor Emeritus Nina Byers, of the Physics and Astronomy Department at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), passed away on June 5, 2014 at her home in Santa Monica, California. Although Nina was primarily a particle theorist, with a broad range of interests across the field, her most important work may well be her contribution to our understanding of superconductivity. She was a trailblazer for women in physics and, in her retirement, led the effort to chronicle the contributions of women to physics in the 20th century.

Nina Byers was born in Los Angeles, California on January 19, 1930. She moved up north to attend college at the University of California Berkeley where in 1950 she graduated with a B.A. in physics, achieving highest honors. It was at Berkeley that she met Enrico Fermi, who was visiting the department and was her teacher in a course on quantum mechanics. Fermi inspired her and encouraged her to attend the University of Chicago, where she went as a graduate student. There she pursued theoretical work and was Murray Gell-Mann’s first and last Chicago student, before he moved to Caltech. Following Gell-Mann’s departure, she became Gregor Wenzel’s student and completed her Ph.D. in 1956 on the interactions of low-energy pions with nuclei.

Following the completion of her Ph.D., Byers joined R.E. Peierls’ group as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Birmingham. There she, with Peierls, investigated an idea just put forward by Schwinger that the weak interactions were mediated by massive charged bosons. They were able to show that the Fermi theory of beta decay is indeed well described by charged vector boson exchange, provided that this boson is very massive. This period in Birmingham marked the start of wonderful friendship between Nina and Peierls, which much later would lead Byers to accept a joint appointment at Oxford when Peierls moved his group there.

In 1958, Byers moved to Stanford as a Research Associate and, shortly thereafter, she became an Assistant Professor. At Stanford Nina continued working on the weak interaction and with Fred Zachariasen, another young Assistant Professor there, she showed that if electron and muon neutrinos were not distinct species then W-exchange would produce a rather large contribution to the muon anomalous dipole moment. The Stanford period was particular active for Nina and it is there that she got interested in superconductivity, spurred by a visit to Stanford by C. N. Yang in spring 1961. Experiments by Deaver and Fairbank had shown that the magnetic flux in superconductors was quantized in units of ch/2e, rather than ch/e, as proposed in the theory put forward by London. In their paper, Byers and Yang masterfully showed that the formation of Cooper pairs in the superconductor results in flux in units of ch/2e and that, therefore, the experiments of Deaver and Fairbank provided an “experimental proof” of the BCS theory of superconductivity based on electron pairing.

Family considerations brought Nina Byers back to Los Angeles in the fall of 1961, where she became an assistant professor at UCLA. She was the first and only female professor in the department for the next 20 years. At UCLA, she returned full time to particle physics. It was the golden era of resonance hunting and Nina concentrated on the problem of determining the spin-parity of resonance states via the angular distribution of their decay products. Her CERN report on this topic, written when she was there on a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1965, was of considerable importance to experimentalists at the time, even though for some reason it was never submitted for publication.

Nina worked on many different topics in particle physics in her long and distinguished career. These ranged from CP violation in K-decays and droplet models of diffractive scattering in the 1960s and calculations of radiative corrections to weak interaction scattering processes in the 1970s, to detailed calculations of the quarkonium potential for heavy quark systems involving charm and bottom quarks in the 1980s. Throughout, her work was characterized by keen physical insight and an understanding and appreciation of experimental results. During her career, Nina was also very committed to the affairs of the American Physical Society, particularly in the Panel of Public Affairs (POPA), the Forum of Physics and Society (FPS), and the Forum on the History of Physics (FHP).

Retirement in 1993 from UCLA was a beginning rather than an end. It was a period of intense work on the history of physics. As a devoted anti-war activist, she was interested in the history surrounding the making of the atomic bomb. She focused on the estrangement of Fermi and Szilard. This work returned her to her roots at the University of Chicago and the period where she would have weekly dinners with Szilard to report on Fermi’s pion work that they were learning about in a seminar. She also studied how Emmy Noether discovered her fundamental theorem relating symmetries of nature to conservation laws when her main work was in the foundations of abstract algebra. Nina’s great accomplishment in this period was documenting the contribution of women like Noether and herself to modern physics. She was the driving force behind the web archive Contribution of Women to 20th Century Physics (http://cwp.library.ucla.edu ) and the resulting book Out of the Shadows: Contribution of Women to 20th Century Physics.

Nina Byers’ passion for learning and activism, extended beyond physics. She was a lover of classical music, film and theater and an activist for social justice and environmental causes. She was always the person who would ask ‘What can we do about this?’ The last project she was embarked in grew out of her concern that eminent scientists no longer make extended visits to other institutions. As a result, students no longer are having experiences like her participation in Fermi’s quantum mechanics course at Berkeley. To alleviate this problem Nina worked to create a prize lectureship that would bring eminent physicists to UCLA, so that UCLA students may have the kind of experience that was so influential to her career. This Nina Byers Lectureship will be an excellent way to honor her remarkable life.

Lindley Winslow, Roberto Peccei and Steven Moszkowski

Obituary: Devoted physicist Nina Byers dies at 84
UCLA Daily Bruin