Mark Anthony Riley is a British nuclear physicist. He is known for his work in

gamma spectroscopy Gamma-ray spectroscopy is the quantitative study of the energy spectra of gamma-ray sources, such as in the nuclear industry, geochemical investigation, and astrophysics. Most radioactive sources produce gamma rays, which are of various energie ...

. Riley earned his bachelor's degree in physics and his doctorate in nuclear physics at the

University of Liverpool , mottoeng = These days of peace foster learning , established = 1881 – University College Liverpool1884 – affiliated to the federal Victoria Universityhttp://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukla/2004/4 University of Manchester Act 200 ...

. He completed postdoctoral research at the

Niels Bohr Institute The Niels Bohr Institute (Danish: ''Niels Bohr Institutet'') is a research institute of the University of Copenhagen. The research of the institute spans astronomy, geophysics, nanotechnology, particle physics, quantum mechanics and biophysics. ...

Oak Ridge National Laboratory Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is a U.S. multiprogram science and technology national laboratory sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and administered, managed, and operated by UT–Battelle as a federally funded research and ...

, and the

University of Tennessee The University of Tennessee (officially The University of Tennessee, Knoxville; or UT Knoxville; UTK; or UT) is a public land-grant research university in Knoxville, Tennessee. Founded in 1794, two years before Tennessee became the 16th state, ...

and held the SERC Advanced Fellowship at the University of Liverpool before joining the faculty of

Florida State University Florida State University (FSU) is a public research university in Tallahassee, Florida. It is a senior member of the State University System of Florida. Founded in 1851, it is located on the oldest continuous site of higher education in the st ...

in 1990. In 2000, Riley was elected a fellow of the

American Physical Society The American Physical Society (APS) is a not-for-profit membership organization of professionals in physics and related disciplines, comprising nearly fifty divisions, sections, and other units. Its mission is the advancement and diffusion of k ...

, "for his many pioneering contributions to the exploration of atomic nuclei at high angular momentum values." The following year, Riley was appointed Raymond K. Sheline Professor of Physics in 2001, and in 2014 was named a Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor at

. He became interim dean of Florida State University's Graduate School in August 2017, and was formally elevated to the deanship in April 2018. An invited

Open Access Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre op ...

comment to a special

Physica Scripta ''Physica Scripta'' is an international scientific journal for experimental and theoretical physics. It was established in 1970 as the successor of ''Arkiv för Fysik'' and published by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (KVA). Since 2006, it h ...

Focus issue celebrating the 40 year anniversary of the 1975

Nobel Prize in Physics ) , image = Nobel Prize.png , alt = A golden medallion with an embossed image of a bearded man facing left in profile. To the left of the man is the text "ALFR•" then "NOBEL", and on the right, the text (smaller) "NAT•" then " ...

Aage Bohr Aage Niels Bohr (; 19 June 1922 – 8 September 2009) was a Danish nuclear physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1975 with Ben Roy Mottelson and James Rainwater "for the discovery of the connection between collective motion and pa ...

Ben Roy Mottelson Ben Roy Mottelson (9 July 1926 – 13 May 2022) was an American-Danish nuclear physicist. He won the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the non-spherical geometry of atomic nuclei. Early life Mottelson was born in Chicago, Illinois on ...

and Leo Rainwater edited by Jerzy Dudek, outlines selected highlights from experimental investigations at the

, Denmark, and

Daresbury Laboratory Daresbury Laboratory is a scientific research laboratory based at Sci-Tech Daresbury campus near Daresbury in Halton, Cheshire, England. The laboratory began operations in 1962 and was officially opened on 16 June 1967 as the Daresbury Nuclear ...

, UK, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, many of which have continued at other national laboratories in Europe and the US to the present day. A 2022

article in

Nuclear Physics News ''Nuclear Physics News, International'' () is a quarterly science magazine covering research in nuclear physics, published since 1990 by Taylor & Francis. It is the official magazine of the Nuclear Physics European Collaboration Committee, an Ex ...

, co-authored with Ramon Wyss, commemorated the 50 year anniversary of the discovery of the 'backbending', or 'rotational alignment', effect in

nuclear structure Understanding the structure of the atomic nucleus is one of the central challenges in nuclear physics. Models The liquid drop model The liquid drop model is one of the first models of nuclear structure, proposed by Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcke ...

physics. Riley produced, with Akis Pipidis, a pedagogical movie illustrating a mechanical analogue of this phenomenon.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Riley, Mark Anthony Fellows of the American Physical Society British university and college faculty deans British nuclear physicists Living people 20th-century British physicists 21st-century British physicists Alumni of the University of Liverpool Florida State University faculty British expatriate academics in the United States 1959 births