Gaja Alaga

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Gaja Alaga (Lemeš, 1924 - Zagreb, 1988) was a Croatian theoretical physicist who specialised in nuclear physics.

He was born in noble family of Bunjevac Croats in the village of Lemeš (today Svetozar Miletić) in northwestern Bačka in Kingdom of SHS (today in autonomous province Vojvodina, Serbia).

He was an academician of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts since 1968 and a professor at the University of Zagreb, on Prirodoslovno-matematički fakultet. He worked in the Institute "Ruđer Bošković" in Zagreb (the capital city of Croatia), the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, the University of California, Berkeley, and Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich.

In 1955, cooperating with Kurt Alder and Ben Roy Mottelson, Alaga discovered the K-selection rules and intensity rules for beta and gamma transitions in deformed atom nuclei. This discovery was key to the development of new nuclei models which confirmed that subatomic particles can distort the shape of the nucleus. These models challenged Aage Niels Bohr, Ben Roy Mottelson and Leo James Rainwater's earlier (1975 Nobel Prize-winning) theory that the nucleus has a perfect spherical shape.

Also in 1955, the journal Physical Review published Alaga's rules for beta and gamma transitions for heavily damaged atomic orbits. Both discoveries are known as Alaga rules, and are now in everyday use among nuclear scientists and in scientific literature.

He was the editor of the scientific magazine Fizika from 1978 until his death in 1998.

He died in Zagreb in 1988.