[1] Although the original formulation of the nuclear shell model predates Świątecki, he and Gertrude Scharff-Goldhaber from Brookhaven National Laboratory calculated that "magic numbers" of protons and neutrons may exist for some superheavy elements and confer additional stability, whose estimated half-lives ranged from minutes to millions of years.
[4] In 1966, Świątecki, along with William Myers and Heiner Meldner, developed a model that revealed an increase in fission barrier height for nuclei centered around atomic number 114, suggesting the possibility of stabilizing shell effects in that region.
Although several other such regions were proposed, including one around element 126 as early as 1957, Świątecki and Myers determined that the Coulomb force would shift the proton shell closure to Z = 114.
[1] The 1994 Thomas-Fermi model of Myers and Świątecki offered several new developments, namely a solution to an anomaly in nuclear curvature.
In recognition for his work, he won the 1990 Marian Smoluchowski Medal[8] of the Polish Physical Society (for which he was a laureate in 1989), and received an honorary degree from the Jagiellonian University in Kraków in 2000.