Joël Scherk

Joël Scherk (* 1946, † 1980) was a French theoretical physicist who worked mainly on string theory and supergravity. He realized with John Schwarz around 1974 that string theory, which was previously considered as a candidate for a theory of the strong interaction, instead a candidate for a Grand Unified Theory ( GUT) of all known interactions, including gravity.

Scherk studied in Paris at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS ). In 1969 he graduated from the University of Paris XI in Orsay his diploma ( Thèse de Troisieme Cycle) with Philippe Meyer and Claude Bouchiat and received his PhD in 1971. 1969, he was now at the CNRS, with John Black and David Gross at Princeton University, where he and his French fellow students André Neveu divergences in one- loop diagrams in the bosonic string theory examined ( they discovered the cause in tachyon divergences ). In 1971 he was again at the ENS, where he showed with Neveu, which could describe the spin-1 excitations of strings Yang-Mills theories. He was also at this time in Berkeley, at CERN and at Cambridge. In 1974 he was a visiting scholar at New York University and at Caltech with Murray Gell-Mann and black. Black and Scherk at that time were some of the few physicists who were still working on the string model, although had shown in 1970 that it is only in higher dimensions (26 in the case of bosonic strings) is consistent. They showed that the spin -2 excitations of closed strings could describe gravity, resulting in thanks to the good high-energy behavior of string theories revealed the possibility of a finite, renormalisierbaren theory of quantum gravity.

Scherk, Schwarz and Lars Brink constructed in 1977, the first supersymmetric Yang-Mills theories and showed that, these, existed in 10 dimensions. With F. Gliozzi and David Olive Scherk then showed that the spectrum of supersymmetric Yang-Mills theories in 10 dimensions from the corresponding (RNS, Ramond - Neveu -Schwarz ) fermion string theory revealed if certain additional conditions are satisfied ( GSO projection for Gliozzi - Scherk - Olive ). This was an indication that, besides the World -sheet supersymmetry already discussed earlier was also present space-time supersymmetry in string theories. In 1978 he constructed with Eugène Cremmer and Bernard Julia, the Lagrangian of supergravity in eleven dimensions.

Scherk establishing himself as one of the leading string theorists in the 1970s. Most recently, he was at the ENS in Paris. He died unexpectedly, according to some data as a result of diabetic coma because he had forgotten his insulin syringe. According to other data, he committed suicide. He therefore had previously a nervous breakdown and was therefore in treatment

Writings

• An introduction to the theory of dual models and strings. In: Reviews of Modern Physics. Volume 47, 1975, p 123