Torleif Ericson
Torleif Erik Oskar Ericson, born November 2, 1930 in Lund, is a Swedish nuclear theoretical physicist. He studied physics at Lund University, from where he obtained his PhD, under the supervision of Ben Mottelson at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics (Nordita), in 1958. Biography. Ericson held positions as a postdoctoral researcher and an instructor at MIT and as a visiting scientist Berkeley from 1959 to 1960. At Berkeley he wrote a paper where he predicted what later became known as 'Ericson fluctuations' and today considered a prime example of quantum chaos. This prediction stimulated in a large  number of nuclear reaction studies, as reviewed a few years later with Mayer-Kuckuk. In 1960 he joined CERN’s Theory Division, first as a fellow, and then as a staff member in 1962. Ericson worked at the interface between high-energy and nuclear physics. In 1963, Ericson, after an initiative by A. de-Shalit and V.F. Weisskopf, organised an international conference on high-energy physics and nuclear structure. The meeting turned out to be of significant importance both for Ericson's own career and the development of this scientific area. The conference series, later generally referred to as PANIC , was the start of the field intermediate physics and has developed into a triennial event. The series is sponsored by IUPAP and has been going on since then. Ericson, together with his wife Magda Ericson, were among the first to focus the interaction of pions with nuclei and to study a regime that was intermediate between the low energies of traditional nuclear physics and the new high energies of elementary particles. This activity led to that CERN set up various scientific committees, in which Ericson was deeply involved in several of them. His research nurtured the link between nuclear and  particle physics and resulted in the extra intermediate pillar referred to as medium-energy physics. In his role as chairman of the Nuclear Structure Committee, Ericson proposed in 1964, to build an on-line isotope separator, which later has become known as ISOLDE. CERN eventually established its ultrarelativistic heavy-ion programme that over the years has attracted a large number of experimental physicists to the laboratory. Ericson is also recognized for his elucidation of the pionic influence on the properties of the deuteron. The year 1969/70, taking advantage of a sabbatical year from CERN, Ericson spent at MIT. During his  career, he has also been invited guest professor at several universities: Geneva, Lausanne, Louvain, Tokyo and Uppsala. In 1993 he became adjunct professor at Uppsala University within the framework of CERN's collaboration with its Member States. Ericson was associated editor in the journal Nuclear Physics A, with responsibility for intermediate energy, from 1976 to 2000. Since 1991 he is one of the general editors of the series Cambridge Monographs on Particle Physics, Nuclear Physics and Cosmology.Ericson has also been editor for a large number of conference proceedings. He officially retired in 1995, while he is still an active  emeritus researcher. Private life. Ericson has been married to the French physicist Magda Ericson since 1957. Together they have two adult children. The Ericson reside in Geneva, Switzerland.