Victor Weisskopf developed a statistical treatment of particle emission from highly excited heavy atomic nuclei. His 1937 paper compares the process with evaporation: the excitation energy is shared among many internal quantum states, and the available final states constrain which particles can escape with which energies. This connects nuclear level density with emission probabilities and approximately thermal-looking outgoing spectra. Nuclear evaporation supplies a way to predict the aggregate outcome of a complicated nuclear reaction without following every individual internal trajectory.[ref]
Statistics and Nuclear Reactions by Victor Weisskopf. 1937 abstract, statistical emission probabilities and evaporation analogy
Portrait of Victor Weisskopf
. GFHund; photograph from Friedrich Hund’s estate, prepared for Wikipedia in August 2010. CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Source. Articles by others on the same topic
Victor Weisskopf (1908–2002) was a prominent Austrian-born American physicist known for his contributions to theoretical physics, particularly in the fields of nuclear and particle physics. He was involved in foundational research during the development of quantum mechanics and made significant contributions to the understanding of elementary particles. Weisskopf was a member of the Manhattan Project and played a role in the development of nuclear energy.