Biography

Ron Johnson is a nuclear theorist. He has been with the University of Surrey since its creation in 1966. He was Head of the Radiation Physics Group from 1983 to 1986, and the Nuclear Physics Group during the periods 1971 to 1983 and 1986 to 1992. Under his leadership the Nuclear Physics Group grew to its present position as the largest Nuclear Physics Group in the UK. From 1992 to 1997 he was Dean of the Faculty of Science. He has held visiting research posts in the USA, Japan, New Zealand and Portugal.
In 1989 he was elected Fellow of the American Institute of Physics "For clarifying and extending theories of spin dependence and antisymmetry in nuclear reactions and for introducing the adiabatic theory of break-up effects."
Professor Johnson was appointed Emeritus Professor from October 1st 2002.

Research Interests

Professor Johnson's special interests include theories of nuclear reactions and nuclear structure with special emphasis on the effects of nuclear spin and nuclear reactions involving loosely bound nuclei, including halo nuclei, and applications to astrophysics.

Research Collaborations

With F D Santos in the 1960's, and later with JA Tostevin and AA Ioannides, Johnson pioneered the study of the effects in nuclear reactions of a non-spherical component (the D-state) in the ground states of the deuteron and other light nuclei. This led to collaborations with experimentalists in the UK, USA, Japan and Europe and provided key insights into their experiments. Johnson's work with P J Soper, J D Harvey and others in the 1970's resulted in an adiabatic approach to break-up effects in nuclear reactions involving deuterons which has proved to be very useful in recent work on the scattering and reactions of halo nuclei in collaborations with J A Tostevin, J S Al-Khalili, I J Thompson and others.
In the 1980's in collaboration with H.Nishioka, J. Gomez-Camacho, J A Tostevin and K.-I Kubo, Johnson introduced a number of concepts, including `tidal symmetry', which provided useful insights into experiments with polarized lithium and sodium ions carried out in the UK and Germany.