David M. Brink

David Maurice Brink (20 July 1930, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia – 8 March 2021, Oxford, UK)

Education and career Brink matriculated in 1947 at the University of Tasmania, where he graduated with a B.Sc. in physics in 1951. As a Rhodes Scholar he became a graduate student in physics at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he received his PhD in 1955. was supervised by Maurice Pryce. From 1954 to 1958 Brink was a Rutherford Scholar of the Royal Society.

He was interested in the physics of giant resonances and developed semi classical methods for heavy ion reactions which he used to explain the selectivity in the population of high angular momentum states in heavy ion transfer reactions and neutron transfer to bound states. His book Angular momentum (with G.R. Satchler) is a classic introduction to the topic.For several years David had a very productive collaboration with Dominique Vautherin, Marcel Vénéroni and their colleagues at Orsay on the use of Skyrme's effective interaction for Hartree-Fock calculations and, later, on the semi classical theory of collective motion in nuclei. He received in 1982 the Rutherford Medal of the Institute of Physics. He was made in 1992 a Foreign Member of the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala. In 2006 he received the Lise Meitner Prize "for his many contributions to the theory of nuclear structure and nuclear reactions over several decades, including his seminal work on the theory of nuclear masses using Skyrme effective interactions, nuclear giant resonances, clustering in nuclei and quantum and semi-classical theories of heavy-ion scattering and reactions."

Selected publications Articles

(over 650 citations) (over 950 citations)

(over 3050 citations)

Books with George Raymond Satchler: Angular Momentum 1962. 2nd edition 1971. 3rd edition. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1993, ISBN 0-19-851759-9 Nuclear Forces, Pergamon Press 1965 German translation: Kernkräfte, WTB Texte, 1971 Semi-classical methods in nucleus-nucleus scattering, Cambridge University Press 1985; 2009 edition as editor with Feodor Karpechine, F. Bary Malik, João Da Providência: with Ricardo A. Broglia: Nuclear superfluidity: pairing in finite systems, Cambridge University Press 2005; e-book ; hbk