Shacheenatha Jha

Shacheenatha Jha, Fellow of the American Physical Society, passed away peacefully on 12 September 2014. Born in the village of Dharampur in Bihar, India 15 November 1918, he had a remarkable life which ranged from swinging in trees “where ghosts lived” and riding an elephant in the village, to being personally invited by Niels Bohr into a discussion of electron tracks in photographic emulsion. Jha taught and did nuclear physics research on four continents.

Jha was one of eight siblings, including brothers who were teachers and scholars. He did not begin formal education until high school, where one brother was headmaster. He attended Science College in Patna, where he “first learned the meaning of ‘science’ from the extensive course of demonstrations in physics and chemistry,” and he obtained his B. Sc. (1939) and M. Sc. (1941) there, then served as research student and Lecturer for five more years.

A lifelong careful reader of the physics literature, in 1946 Jha wrote to British professors whose names he had learned from the literature, and Norman Feather (noted for studies of electrons emitted in beta decay) agreed to take him on as a doctoral student at Edinburgh. In those days before lucrative international student fellowships, Jha obtained support via a grant from the Maharaja of Darbhanga, ruler of the local princely state. For his 1950 dissertation, Jha tackled the current question “Which isotope of samarium is the long-lived alpha-emitter?” Reasoning from Maria Mayer’s recently published analysis of “magic numbers” Jha proposed that Sm-146 (with 84 neutrons) would have already decayed to leave magic 82 neutrons, so that Sm-147 was the next best candidate. (Subsequently several Sm isotopes were found to be long-lived alpha emitters.)

Jha’s initial professional research, beginning in 1951, was performed at TIFR, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, in Bombay (now Mumbai). He used a sodium iodide photodetector to study the decay of 25-minute I-128, produced with a Ra-Be source and separated by radiochemistry “standing on the stairs"; the results were published in volume 1 of the journal “Nuclear Physics” in 1956. At TIFR Jha and colleague Gaurang Yodh confirmed parity violation in beta decay by measuring circular polarization of external bremsstrahlung. They formed a lifelong friendship. Having moved to the US, Yodh helped Jha transition in 1961 to Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon) in Pittsburgh.

Jha and his students studied beta-decay of isotopes produced at Carnegie Tech’s synchrocyclotron. These were the early days of Ge(Li) detectors, whose higher resolution allowed searching for splitting of the second excited state of the daughter near-spherical neutron-deficient isotopes. In 1966 Jha moved to Western Reserve University (now Case-Western Reserve) and maintained a research program in collaboration with Jim Blue and others, including Jha’s former students, at the synchrocyclotron of NASA-Lewis Research Center (now the Glenn Research Center) in Cleveland.

In 1969 Jha accepted a tenured full professorship at the University of Cincinnati, where he taught and did research until his retirement in 1989 and final research in 1991. For some twenty years, faculty and students at nearby Miami University benefited from collaboration in Jha’s research. Here he adopted techniques wherein the nucleus was no longer the object of study, but now a tool to study its crystalline environment. First he employed TDPAC (time differential perturbed angular correlation) to study Heusler alloys and chalcogenide spinels. Later he used Moessbauer spectroscopy to study antiferromagnetic perovskite compounds related to the recently discovered high-temperature superconductors.

During sabbaticals Jha did research at Manchester England (1973-74) and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (1982). He was always welcome because he always brought along ideas for new experiments.

Jha seemed to know all the nuclei as personal friends, and he appeared to have memorized the decay schemes of all the radioisotopes. A naïve beginning student might have thought the difference between Cd-110 and Cd-111 was simply a neutron; he had much to learn from this teacher. Jha directed doctoral dissertations of students at T.I.F.R., Carnegie Tech, Western Reserve University, and the University of Cincinnati. Students of Jha included R. M. Singru, who became Head of physics at I. I.T. Kanpur, and R. S. Raghavan, noted for studies of low-energy solar neutrinos.

Outside of physics, Jha was known for his love of fishing, and he was an artist; he even posed for a portrait by celebrated Scottish artist Anne Redpath. He is survived by Prabha, his wife of nearly 60 years, and by their four children and six grandchildren, of whom they are enormously and justifiably proud.

We shall greatly miss him.

Submitted by:
Glenn M. Julian
Kalanand Mishra
Gaurang B. Yodh