Rolf Hagedorn

Rolf Hagedorn ( born July 20, 1919 in Barmen, † March 9, 2003 in Geneva ) was a German theoretical physicist.

Hagedorn made ​​in 1937 in Wuppertal -Barmen graduated from high school and was in World War II in the Air Force in North Africa. In American prisoner of war in 1943 he came to Tennessee, where he occasionally taught physics at a high school. In 1946 he was released from captivity.

He then studied physics at the University of Göttingen. There he wrote his 1950 thesis on the Lamb shift and received his PhD in 1952 with Richard Becker on a topic in solid state physics ( statistical model of barium titanate ). Hagedorn was very early in 1954 theorist at CERN ( was with a letter of recommendation by Werner Heisenberg, who one of his teachers in Göttingen), in the accelerator theory group in Geneva for the planned proton synchrotron, which with the 1952 developed in the U.S. principle of strong should focus work. He remained there the rest of his career and was at his retirement in 1984 Senior Physicist. Even after that he continued working at CERN, especially on heavy ion collisions at high energies and the resulting quark-gluon plasma.

At CERN, he studied first in the 1950s with Teilchenbeschleunigerphysik and later with the statistical theory of Mesonenproduktion in hadron collisions (where he began in the late 1950s for his computer calculations of the TH Darmstadt and CERN ). In this context, he led in the 1960s, the Hagedorn temperature, which corresponds to the deconfinement temperature ( a kind of " melting point" for hadrons ) and also in other contexts ( generally at exponentially with the energy increasing density of states, is the Hagedorn temperature then, the temperature at which diverges the partition ) is important, for example, in string theory. In the same work in 1965, he developed the statistical bootstrap model ( also independent of Steven Frautschi developed ). Hagedorn was known at CERN for his lectures and various Yellow Reports (review article ). He also developed an interactive software for computer algebra (Sigma ) at CERN.

Writings

  • Relativistic kinematics - a guide to kinematic problems in high energy physics, Benjamin, Reading / Massachusetts 1963, 1973
  • Introduction to field theory and dispersion relations, Macmillan 1964
  • Selected topics in scattering theory, Geneva 1962
  • With Masud Chaichian: Selected topics in quantum mechanics: from angular momentum to supersymmetry, Bristol, Philadelphia, Institute of Physics ( IOP) 1998
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