Richard Casten

Richard F. Casten, the D. Allan Bromley Professor Emeritus of Physics, obtained his Ph.D. from Yale in 1967, the first Ph.D. in the new generation in the era of the Yale MP-1 Tandem accelerator. His adviser was Professor Bromley. After Postdoctoral stints, he worked at Brookhaven National Laboratory and came to Yale as a professor of physics in 1995. He was the director of the Wright Nuclear Structure Laboratory (now Wright Lab) from 1995 until 2008. After Bromley’s passing, he was named the first incumbent of the D. Allan Bromley chair at Yale. He authored a graduate-level textbook in nuclear physics titled Nuclear Structure from a Simple Perspective. He served as an associate editor of the Physics Review C journal from 2001 until 2024. In 2013–2014 he developed a unique course for undergraduate non-science majors on Physics in the World around Us.

He is the winner of the 2011 Tom W. Bonner Prize in Nuclear Physics of the American Physical Society(APS) for discoveries of dynamical symmetries and studies of the evolution of collectivity in atomic nuclei. He was awarded the 2009 Mentoring Award of the Division of Nuclear Physics(DNP) of the APS for mentoring female graduate students. He received honorary doctorates from the University of Surrey (UK) and Bucharest University (Romania), and was chair of the DOE/NSF Nuclear Science Advisory Committee (NSAC) from 2003 to 2005, chair of DNP in 2008, and chair of the ISL (later FRIB) Steering and Science Advisory Committees from 1989 to 2009. In 1983 he was awarded the (Senior US) Humboldt award for study at the University of Cologne. From 1989 until 2015, he was a leader in the worldwide effort to develop and build a new generation of accelerators for the study of exotic unstable nuclei.

Professor Casten’s research, primarily experimental but complemented by theoretical work, focused on studies of dynamic symmetries in the structure of atomic nuclei and of the structural evolution of the nucleus as a function of the numbers of its constituent protons and neutrons. His research has included the discovery of the new O(6) dynamical symmetry of the Interacting Boson Model (IBM) and of the first detailed study of SU(3) in deformed nuclei, of the first evidence for Quantum Phase Transitions(QPT) in nuclei, and studies of the role of the valence proton-neutron interaction in the evolution of collective structure in nuclei. He co-invented the Consistent Q-Formalism for the IBM, a now-standard approach to using that model. Experimentally, he developed the concept of complete nuclear spectroscopy using average resonance capture, and co-authored the paper with the first use of medium-energy Coulomb excitation.