Obituary of Manoj Kanti Banerjee

Manoj Kanti Banerjee, a prominent and brilliant theoretical nuclear physicist, passed away February 18, 2006 from arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease at his home in Bethesda, Maryland. He had recovered from a serious heart attack in 1978. His health had declined slowly following a recurrence in 1997 and heart bypass surgery in 1998. Manoj’s beloved wife, Uma, died in 1995.

Born May 25, 1931, in Patna India, Manoj was educated at Patna University and Calcutta University. As a lecturer at the Palit Research Laboratory in Physics of the University of Calcutta, his early studies in nuclear beta decay were supervised by Professor A. K. Saha. Following the death of Professor Saha, the institute was renamed the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics in 1956.

Banerjee first came to the United States in 1955 as a research fellow at Princeton University to work with E. P. Wigner, who later was awarded the Nobel Prize. He performed important work with Carl A. Levinson to develop the theory of direct nuclear reactions and provide the first serious calculations of nuclear reaction cross sections using computers of the late fifties. He and a student also performed the first shell model calculations using the Breuckner G-matrix interaction.

Banerjee returned to the Saha Institute in 1957 to accept a position as Reader, he left again in 1959 for a year at Princeton as Research Associate, and returned again to Saha Institute in 1960 as Professor. He visited the Weizman Institute, Israel, during the 1962-63 year.

Manoj Banerjee joined the faculty of the Department of Physics, University of Maryland, College Park, in 1966 as a professor of physics. He was a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, and served on the editorial board of Physical Review Letters. He held visiting professor positions at the University of Manchester, England, the University of Washington, Seattle, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and the National Taiwan University and he was a Weizman Institute Fellow. In 1996-97, he was a recipient of an Alexander von Humboldt Research Award for Senior U.S. Scientists and spent most of a year at the KFA, Inst. for Kernphysik, Juelich, Germany. However, because of deteriorating health he cut short his visit in order to return to the U.S. Banerjee retired from the University of Maryland teaching faculty in 2001. He continued his association with the Department of Physics as a Senior Research Scientist and Professor Emeritus.

Manoj was a teacher and an intellectual leader. He possessed an uncommon intensity and he cared very much about reaching a high level of truth and understanding grounded in fundamental principles. Over his career, he supervised the research of 22 Ph.D. students, ten of whom were students at the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics. One of his former students said “I will never forget his contagious passion for doing physics”. He had a very gentle nature with regard to personal interactions.

In the 1970s, Banerjee became interested in the fundamental dynamics of mesons and nucleons in order to understand better their roles in the formation of nuclei. In 1978, he and a student developed a notable theory of the interactions of a pi-meson with a nucleon that provided new insights into the sigma term that controls s-wave pion-nucleon interactions.

In 1981, Manoj was asked to return to the Saha Institute to accept the directorship, a selection that was announced on the front page of the Times of India. Ultimately, he declined the position out of concern that its administrative burdens would make it impossible for him to continue his research.

In 1984 he and collaborators developed a chiral soliton model of the nucleon and delta resonance that was based on quarks interacting with a pion cloud. This much-cited model and variants of it that were developed by other workers have provided valuable insights into the dynamics of mesons and nuclei.

Manoj’s enthusiasm for the interplay of new ideas and new research directions was a hallmark of his career. He is missed by his colleagues at Maryland and his students and friends everywhere.