In Memoriam: Peter Schuck (1940–2022)

Abstract

Professor Dr. Peter Schuck, one of the leading specialists in many-body physics in nuclear and other fundamental systems, passed away on 10 September 2022, at the age of 82. He began his education at the Technical University of Munich in a group headed by Wilhelm Brenig, introducing Green’s function techniques into the description of manybody systems. Following his Ph.D., as a postdoc at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, he worked with Felix Villars on collective vibrations and their coupling to singleparticle motion. He went to France, first to the Institut Laue Langevin and later to the IPN in Grenoble. In 1980, he joined the IPN in Orsay, where he became directeur de research at the CNRS. During his years in Grenoble, he collaborated with Peter Ring on the celebrated book The Nuclear Many-Body Problem (1980), which is still one of the most important textbooks on nuclear theory, particularly concerning many-body techniques applied to finite self-bound Fermi systems. Generations of young researchers have used this book for their work. Today it is also well known in physical chemistry and mesoscopic condensed matter physics. Schuck also worked on ideas to describe strongly interacting finite Fermi systems as a system of interacting bosons; that is, on a microscopic interpretation of the phenomenological Interacting Boson Model of Arima and Iachello that was, and is still, used worldwide with great success for the description of nuclear spectra. He also studied collective phenomena as, for example, various forms of scissor modes in deformed protonand neutron-distributions (isospin-scissors) or spin orientations (spin-scissors) that oscillate against each other. Together with groups in Barcelona, Catania, and Madrid, he developed in Paris a very successful new energy density functional (BCPM) for the universal description of nuclear systems. Schuck also worked on intermediate energy nuclear physics and was the first to predict a strong in-medium dependence of the spectral intensity of the so-called sigma meson. In addition, he developed the theory of quantum condensates and pairing. He also made important contributions to the physics of cold atoms and other problems in condensed matter. Over the years, he developed an interest in various extensions of the random phase approximation and the equationof-motion method. Since 2000, Schuck became well known in relation to the theory of alpha particle condensation in nuclear systems (e.g., quartetting in the Hoyle state). Since this theory was first proposed in 2001, in a highly cited article in Physical Review Letters, it has provoked a strong increase in interest internationally, both theoretically and experimentally, and initiated a number of conferences and several reviews. Schuck enjoyed various international collaborations, particularly within Europe and with colleagues from India, Japan, and China. He was editor of European Physical Journal A and was one of the most respected theoreticians from the European Physical Society (EPS). In 2004, he was the recipient of the Gay-LussacHumboldt prize. In 2018, together with Peter Ring, he received the Lise Meitner Prize for nuclear physics from the EPS. With the passing of Peter Schuck, we not only lose a foremost expert in the field of nuclear theory and manybody physics, who inspired many new ideas, initiated discussions, and collaborations. Above all, we have lost a friend and congenial colleague who was always helpful and receptive to new problems. We will remember him with great fondness and miss him in future work.