James Bjorken

James Daniel Bjorken ( born June 22, 1934 in Chicago) is an American theoretical physicist.

Life and work

Until 1952 he attended the Maine Township High School in Park Ridge. Subsequently, he studied until 1956 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Physics in 1959 received his doctorate at Stanford University. Then he taught and conducted research at this University and since 1962 at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, except in the years 1979 to 1989, when he was director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Since 1998 he is professor emeritus. 1995/96 he was a visiting professor at Oxford.

He first described the now named after him Bjorken scaling in deep inelastic electron-proton scattering, which contributed decisively to prove the existence of quarks. He said Sheldon Glashow in 1964 with the existence of a fourth quark ahead, which he called "charmed particle" and which was confirmed experimentally in 1974. Later, he developed a hydrodynamic model for nucleus-nucleus collisions and dealt with the properties of hadrons containing bottom quarks.

Among his students Helen Quinn ( born 1943 ), the 2000 was also honored with the Dirac Medal, and Davison Soper ( b. 1943 ).

Prizes and awards

He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1973 ), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and has been honored with many awards, in 1972, with the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics of the American Physical Society the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award U.S. Department of Energy, the Pomeranchuk prize of ITEP and 2004, the Dirac Medal ( ICTP ). He holds honorary doctorates from the University of Turin and the University of Notre Dame.

Works

• James Bjorken, Sidney Drell: Relativistic Quantum Mechanics. . Bibliographical Institute, Mannheim 1990 (BI university paperbacks; 98/98a ), ISBN 3-411-00098-8. engl. Original Issue: Relativistic Quantum Mechanics. McGraw- Hill, New York 1964, ISBN 0-07-005493-2.

• Engl. Original Issue: Relativistic Quantum Fields. McGraw- Hill, New York 1965, ISBN 0-07-005494-0.