Nuclear physicist, Cebo Ngwetsheni has authored a ground-breaking paper on nuclear polarization titled “Continuing Influence of Shell Effects at High-Excitation Energies”.
His paper has made it into one of the world’s leading scientific journals, Physics Letters, the publication that published the Nobel-deciding discovery of the Higgs Boson, also known as the God Particle.
According to the University of the Western Cape’s (UWC) website, the paper was published as Ngwetsheni graduated with his Master’s in Nuclear Physics. His thesis is titled “Polarizability Effects Due to the Low-energy Enhancement of the Gamma-strength Function”.
Ngwetsheni is a Professor of Physics.
Ngwetsheni is quoted as saying he had always wanted to be either a scientist or an engineer, something that would allow him to do research and also to work with cutting-edge technology.
He said his view of success was not only about his own career but also about helping others. His dream is to contribute to the ultimate quest for understanding the natural world and to inspire others so that they will see that they can do it too.
Co-author and thesis supervisor, Professor Nico Orce said on the UWC website, “Cebo has achieved a beautiful piece of physics that is far out of the box.
Among other breakthroughs, our work reveals a new spectroscopic probe to search for magic numbers at high-excitation energies. It’s exciting in what it means for science.”
Away from his research and focus on nuclear physics, Cebo Ngwetsheni is a part-time lecturer in radiography at the Central Peninsula University of Technology and has a huge interest in farming.
