Wilton Catford is one of the seven nuclear experimentalists on the staff at the University of Surrey and leads the Nuclear Physics and Applications research group. His research interests are in nuclear spectroscopy and reactions, with particular emphasis on light to medium mass nuclei with a large neutron excess or a highly deformed cluster structure. His main research activity is studying nucleon transfer in experiments using radioactive beams. A brand new initiative in this area is FAUST at FRIB, led by the Surrey group. Recently he has been working with the MUGAST/GRIT and TIARA and SHARC/TIGRESS collaborations - currently mainly at GANIL and at TRIUMF. He is the instigator and project leader for TIARA. He has also taken an active involvement in working towards the next generation of intense radioactive beam facilities being proposed for Europe, and is a keen supporter of the facilities FRIB in the USA, SPIRAL2 (in France, at GANIL), HIE-ISOLDE at CERN and the European FAIR facility at Darmstadt in Germany.
He has from time to time engaged in gamma-ray studies, and he led the TaLL collaboration which successfully demonstrated gamma-ray spectroscopy using a radioactive beam of Ne19 at Louvain-la-Neuve . He is enthusiastic about the opportunities for gamma-ray studies using radioactive beams, and the idea behind the major TIARA project is to combine the benefits of state-of-the-art gamma-ray and charged particle techniques. He sits on the Steering Committee for the European gamma-ray array EXOGAM, which was designed using many of the lessons learnt in TaLL. Applications of physics also interest him, and over coffee he will even talk to you about applications of nuclear detection techniques to medical and environmental problems.
In Cricket , he fails the Norman
Tebbit test with flying colours and supports Australia
against everyone (like a true Aussie should) and England
against noone. He was a European citizen for two months,
up until 31 January 2020 when Brexit
removed it.
In Art ,
as in life, he can't take himself too seriously since he
discovered that he likes the work of
Mark Rothko . His taste in music can perhaps best be
described as eclectic, but tragically
hip covers it reasonably well.
