She was known as the prettiest girl in Goettingen in the late 1920s. And she received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 for the shell model of atomic nuclei. In between Maria Goeppert Mayer traveled from Germany to New York to Chicago to San Diego spending time in Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. In the late 1940s she was fascinated by Òmagic numbersÓ of neutrons and protons that corresponded to atomic isotopes with enhanced abundances or exhibited simple properties. Her recognition of the importance of a strongly attractive spin-orbit interaction in the effective nuclear interaction led to the shell model of atomic nuclei and the Nobel Prize. That the complex many-body system of neutrons and protons of heavy atomic nuclei displays the simple properties of a shell structure was not expected and to this day is a central framework in nuclear physics. After being validated in stable isotopes of atomic nuclei, the current frontier in nuclear structure physics is understanding the properties of nuclei far from the valley of stability and the persistence (or not) of shell structure. Recently we showed that tin-132 with magic numbers of both neutrons (82) and protons (50) is one of the best examples of a doubly-magic nucleus, even though it has a half-life of only 40 seconds. The present talk will provide an introduction to the contributions of Maria Goeppert Mayer to nuclear science and the nuclear shell model, the impact her work is having today and how it is guiding future research.

This work is supported in part by the National Nuclear Security Administration under the Stewardship Science Academic Alliances program through the U.S. DOE Cooperative Agreement DE-FG52-08NA28552 with Rutgers University.

Reference: K.L. Jones, et al., Nature 465, 454 (2010).