In 1954, Talmi joined the
Weizmann Institute of Science where he became Professor of Physics in 1958. Talmi was one of the founders of the Department of Nuclear Physics at the Weizmann Institute. He served as the Head of the Nuclear Physics Department (1967–1976), and the Dean of the Faculty of Physics (1970–1984). Talmi spent sabbatical years at
Princeton,
Stanford,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT),
Yale and other universities as a
visiting professor. Talmi was a member of the
Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities from 1963, and was the Chairman of the Division of Sciences from 1974 to 1980. He also served on the Israel Atomic Energy Commission. In addition to his influential papers and conference talks, Talmi also wrote
two books that served as guides and companions to generations of nuclear structure theorists. The first, written with the late
Amos de-Shalit, was a veritable bible of shell theory and the second, written some 30 years later, continued the tradition of being an exhaustive compendium of relevant results and derivations.
Nuclear physics research Talmi's main field of research was the theory of
nuclear structure. The
atomic nucleus can be composed of a large number of
protons and
neutrons which move due to strong interactions between them. In spite of their complexity, nuclei exhibit some simple and regular features. Most importantly, nuclei behave as if they move independently in a common static
potential well. This gives rise to the existence of shells of protons and neutrons much like the electronic shells in atoms. Nuclei whose proton and neutron shells are complete have special stability and the numbers of protons and of neutrons in them are called
magic numbers. This picture of the nucleus is called the nuclear
shell model. To calculate energies of nuclear states it is necessary to know the exact form of the forces which act between the nuclear constituents. These are still not sufficiently known even after many years of research. Talmi developed a method to obtain the information from experimental data and use it to calculate and predict energies which have not been measured. This method has been successfully used by many nuclear physicists and has led to deeper understanding of nuclear structure. The theory which gives a good description of these properties was developed. This description turned out to furnish the shell model basis of the elegant and successful
interacting boson models. Talmi also participated in the study of explicit fermion–boson mappings required to connect the interacting-boson model with its shell-model roots and in the introduction of the boson F-spin analog to nucleon isospin. ==Awards and recognition==