Obituary of John David Fox

Experimental nuclear physicist John David Fox died in his home in Knoxville on March 11, 2007, after a short battle with a brain tumor. John was born in Huntington, W. Va, December 8, 1929 and received his BS in physics from MIT in 1952 and his PhD in nuclear physics under the direction of Peter Axel from the University of Illinois, Urbana in 1960. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Brookhaven National Laboratory he joined the faculty of Florida State University in 1959 and its new nuclear physics laboratory that had as its accelerator one of the first operational tandem Van de Graaff accelerators in the world.

The excellent beam energy resolution and ease of beam energy change possible with these tandems was quickly used by John and his collaborators to discover isobaric analog resonances in medium and heavy mass nuclei. This work published in 1964 led to a large number of similar studies around the world that resulted in greatly increasing our knowledge of single particle structure in nuclei. In these isobaric analog states, a proton behaves as if it were a neutron and vice versa. Their work established that isospin is a good quantum number even in heavy nuclei so that protons and neutrons can be treated as two states of the same particle. The numerous graduate students whose thesis work mapped the range of nuclei displaying isobaric analog resonances and their fine structure went on to join the many new tandem labs around the world. As a result of this discovery and other pioneering research that took place in the new FSU laboratory, the NSF designated it as one of its Centers of Excellence in 1968 and as part of this program, the original EN tandem was replaced by the larger Super FN tandem Van de Graaff..

In the 1970s John became the director of the FSU nuclear physics laboratory and led the effort to secure State of Florida and NSF funding to add a state-of-the-art superconducting linac to boost the tandem beam energy to even higher energies. During this period John spent considerable time at Argonne National Laboratory working with their linac group to transfer their expertise to the FSU laboratory. This new facility was dedicated in 1986 and allowed the laboratory to greatly expand its range of experiments. In the 1990s John’s focus turned to service to the physics community where he served as a program director in nuclear physics at the National Science Foundation from 1990-1992 and then again from 1995-1997. He retired from the Florida State University faculty in 1994 and moved to Knoxville Tennessee, where he began a very successful collaboration with nuclear physicists at the Hollifield accelerator facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. This return to Oak Ridge was a homecoming for John since he had carried out his first experiments there after joining the FSU faculty while its accelerator was being installed.

John was a Humboldt Fellow at the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg in 1968 and a guest scientist at the Institute für Kernphysik at the University of Köln in 1975. He was a guest scientist at Argonne National Laboratory from 1982 until his death.

Just before his death, Florida State University honored John by naming its accelerator laboratory The John D. Fox Superconducting Accelerator Laboratory. John will be missed by the many physicists he nurtured throughout his career and the field of nuclear physics has lost one of its most energetic members.