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World War 2
In April 1940, when Aage was 17, Denmark was invaded by the armed forces of Nazi Germany.
This was a worrying time for the Bohr family. Aages mother and father were both baptized
Christians, but Aages grandmother (Niels Bohrs mother) was Jewish, and this connection meant
there could be trouble from the Nazis.
At first, however, there were no problems and, aged 18, Aage enrolled at Copenhagen University
intending to obtain a degree in physics. He also became a scientific assistant to his father, with
gradually increasing input to his fathers physics research.
In September 1943, the Nazis decided to deport Denmarks Jews to concentration camps.
The Bohr family fled in fishing boats across the short stretch of water separating Denmark from
Sweden. Sweden was officially neutral and had not been invaded by the Nazis. Nearly all of
Denmarks 7000 Jews fled over the sea to Sweden in 1943.
In October 1943, one week apart, Niels and Aage Bohr flew from Sweden over Nazi-occupied
Norway to the United Kingdom. They flew in British warplanes, which came to Sweden to collect
them. Margrethe Bohr decided to remain in Sweden, where she stayed until the war ended.
At the age of 21, Aage Bohr was flown from Sweden over Nazi-occupied Norway and the North Sea to
Scotland in a de Havilland Mosquito. Such a flight was not free of risk!
Once safely in the UK, father and son began scientific research for the British Government, working
in the atomic bomb project headed by James Chadwick.
In 1944 father and son became involved in the Manhattan Project, spending significant amounts of
time in the United States as well as London. To keep their presence in America secret, they traveled
under the names Nicholas Baker and James Baker.
The Tech Area at Los Alamos became very familiar to father and son Nicholas Baker and James Baker as
they helped with the Manhattan Project.
What was the nucleus really like were there any structural details, and if so, what were they?
The tiny atomic nucleus was modeled as a drop of liquid held together by surface tension. Just like a liquid,
the shape of the drop was spherical, but could be deformed from this shape.
The liquid drop model had its greatest successes in explaining the properties of heavy nuclei, such
as uranium.
By 1950, however, the liquid drop model was in danger of being pushed aside by the newer shell
model of the nucleus.
Much like electrons are said to occupy shells of different energy outside the nucleus, the shell model
of the nucleus says protons and neutrons occupy distinct energy shells inside the nucleus.
Shell model of an atomic nucleus, showing different energy levels. Image by Schunck.
By 1950, most physicists had decided the shell model looked more promising than the liquid-drop
model.
In particular, the shell model explained why atomic nuclei with so-called magic numbers of
protons+neutrons are particularly stable. This is similar to the concept taught in high school
chemistry, where atoms with complete electron shells, for example, 2 or 8 electrons in their
outermost shells are particularly stable, leading to the unreactive behavior of the noble gases.
In the case of atomic nuclei, the magic numbers of 2, 8, 20, 28, 50, 82 and 126 protons+neutrons
result in particularly stable nuclei.
The shell model was particularly good at explaining the properties of lighter nuclei and nuclei with
the magic numbers of protons+neutrons, but was less successful with heavy nuclei such as uranium.
Today,itisdifficulttofullyimaginethegreatimpactofthe
evidencefornuclearshellstructureonthephysicistsbroughtupwiththe
conceptsoftheliquiddrop.
AAGEBOHR,1975
Nobel Lecture
Unification
In fact, the liquid-drop model and the shell model both had advantages and disadvantages
indicating that neither could be the full story.
In 1949, James Rainwater, a Columbia University physicist, decided to combine the best aspects of
the liquid-drop and shell models into a single unified model of the nucleus.
At that time Rainwater shared an office at Columbia with Bohr and explained his ideas to him. Bohr
was captivated, seeing the potential of Rainwaters ideas to explain the behavior and structure of the
atomic nucleus.
Bohr returned to Copenhagen, determined to pursue the unified model further. There he worked with
Ben Mottelson, who had completed his Ph.D. at Harvard University and who was now in
Copenhagen on a Traveling Fellowship from Harvard.
Together, Bohr and Mottelson worked out in intricate detail how a unified model could explain a huge
number of experimental observations from different atomic nuclei. In 1953 they published a 173page report describing their unified model and in 1954 Bohr published The Rotational States of
Atomic Nuclei. Crucially, predictions they made about how nuclei would behave were verified in
experiments.
One of their key findings was that some of the behavior of nuclei could be explained by nuclei having
different amounts of energy resulting from rotation. Furthermore, nuclei do not rotate as rigid objects
but, instead, a surface wave travels around the nucleus. They also found that nuclei vibrate,
changing their shape around an average value.
At first Bohr had trouble convincing his father that the liquid-drop model should be dropped after
all, Niels Bohr was one of the liquid-drop models main architects but eventually he won his father
round.
The unified model often called the collective model is sometimes likened to a swarm of bees,
where each bee is a neutron or proton and the swarm is the nucleus. The swarm acts as a single
entity, even though each bee within it is moving around independently with its own, individual energy.
In the Bohr-Mottelson model, the outside of the swarm rotates and wobbles inward and outward.
Each neutron or proton has its own orbital energy within the nucleus. These orbits can sometimes
deform the nucleus so that it is no longer truly spherical. For example, the nucleus of heavier atoms
can become an oblate spheroid (discus shaped) or prolate spheroid (football shaped).
Of course, we need to remember that atomic nuclei have a diameter of between 1.7 x 10 15 m for
hydrogen and about 15 x 1015 m for uranium.
The fact that Bohr and others were able to mathematically model such incredibly small objects,
producing fine structural detail, and predicting their behavior in agreement with experimental data is
remarkable.
In 1975, Aage Bohr, Ben Mottelson and James Rainwater shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for their
model of the nucleus. In the words of the award committee, the prize was:
for the discovery of the connection between collective motion and particle motion in atomic nuclei
and the development of the theory of the structure of the atomic nucleus based on this connection.
Despite the huge strides taken by the trio of physicists, even today, the structural details of atomic
nuclei have still not been fully resolved.
The End
Aage Bohr died on September 8, 2009, aged 87. He was buried in the Mariebjerg Cemetery,
Copenhagen. His first wife, Marietta, died in 1978.
Bohr was survived by his second wife, Bente Meyer Scharff, whom he had married in 1981, and by
two sons and a daughter from his marriage to Marietta. One of his sons, Tomas, became a Professor
of Physics at the Technical University of Denmark.
Theconstantquestioningofourvaluesandachievementsisa
challengewithoutwhichneithersciencenorsocietycanremainhealthy.
AAGEBOHR,1975