Prof. Douglas Cline passed away

On June 23, 2025, Prof. Douglas Cline passed away. He was an outstanding scientist who laid the foundations for modern research on the structure of atomic nuclei using the Coulomb excitation method. Since 1963, he worked at the University of Rochester in the USA, where he built the Nuclear Structure Research Laboratory (NSRL) accelerator facility and directed it from 1988 to 1999. The Cline criterion for safe energy in Coulomb excitations and the Kumar-Cline sum rules will remain in the history of nuclear physics. Together with Tomasz Czosnyka and C.Y.Wu, he was the author of the GOSIA program, which was fundamental for the analysis of Coulomb excitations.

He was a master and friend of many Polish physicists, whom he hosted in Rochester and with whom he collaborated for years.
In 2012, he received the highest distinction of the Polish Physical Society – the Smoluchowski Medal.

“It is tremendous honor to receive the Marian Smoluchowski Medal and I am deeply indebted to everyone involved for including me in the list of distinguished laureates of this award. This talk entitled “Coulomb excitation as a probe of nuclear structure” will describe collaborative work developed at Rochester plus Warsaw that led to the Warsaw Heavy Ion Laboratory becoming a world-leading centre in this field of nuclear structure.”