Aage Bohr

Aage Bohr (1922- ), Danish physicist and Nobel laureate. Aage Niels Bohr was born in Copenhagen. The son of Niels Bohr, he assisted his father on the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos, New Mexico, during World War II. He then joined the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen, devoting his attention to the inner structure of the atom.

In 1954 he wrote his doctoral thesis at the University of Copenhagen. It dealt with a collective motion theory of the atomic nucleus that he had developed with the United States physicist Ben R. Mottelson at the suggestion of the US physicist James Rainwater. The theory helped to explain many nuclear properties by showing that nuclear particles can vibrate and rotate so as to distort the shape of the nucleus from the expected spherical symmetry into an ellipsoid. Bohr, Mottelson, and Rainwater received the 1975 Nobel Prize for Physics for this work.

In 1963 Bohr became Director of the institute, now renamed in honour of his father. He resigned in 1970 to devote more time to research, but in 1975 he became Director of the Nordic Institute of Theoretical Atomic Physics, which shares research and facilities with the Niels Bohr Institute.