Obituary of Ian Ellery McCarthy

Ian Ellery McCarthy was born in Adelaide on 19 June 1930 and died there on 23 April 2005. He was educated at St Peter’s College, where he excelled not only scholastically but also at rowing and clarinet, and at the University of Adelaide (BSc 1952, PhD in mathematical physics 1956), where he was the first student to complete a doctorate under the supervision of Professor Bert Green in the new Department of Mathematical Physics. He received a Shell Scholarship to undertake post-graduate work at Cambridge University and moved there in mid 1955.

After further postdoctoral appointments at the University of Minnesota and the University of California, Los Angeles, he returned to the University of Adelaide in 1960 as a lecturer and then senior lecturer in mathematical physics. In1963 he accepted an appointment as Associate Professor of Physics at the University of California, Davis, moving to the University of Oregon as Professor of Physics in 1965. In 1968 he moved back to Adelaide to take up the position of Professor of Physics at Flinders University, retiring in 1996.

His work encompassed several distinct areas of theoretical physics but was united by a common methodology, the calculation of quantal scattering and reaction processes. His first work was on the optical model of the nucleus, where he studied nuclear reactions and the information they can give about nuclear wave functions. He was also active in treating nucleon-nucleus interactions as quasi three body systems, making useful contributions to the treatment of deuteron stripping reactions.

McCarthy’s second major contribution was to (e,2e) spectroscopy, in partnership with Erich Weigold. This led to determinations of the momentum distribution of the struck electrons. His group at Flinders University became a world leader in this area.

He was also involved in a number of other theoretical advances, including the semi classical exchange approximation, widely regarded as one of the best approximate static exchange potentials for electron scattering calculations. Later work was on including continuum effects in optical model calculations.

McCarthy was elected to the Australian Academy of Science in 1982. He was also a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the Australian Institute of Physics. He presented invited papers at a number of international conferences and was a member of the international editorial committee for the Journal of Electron Spectroscopy and Related Phenomena. In addition, he wrote a number of books including a graduate textbook, Introduction to Nuclear Theory (1968), and a senior secondary textbook, Physics, a Laboratory-Oriented Approach (1973), the latter with a number of co-authors.

He is survived by his wife Janet, his children Catherine, Helen, James, Jane and Patrick, and his nine grandchildren.