Vladimir Gribov

Vladimir Naumovich Gribow (Russian: Владимир Наумович Грибов, scientific transliteration Vladimir Naumović Gribov, cited in English as Vladimir Gribov, born March 25, 1930 in Leningrad † August 13, 1997 in Budapest) was a leading Russian theoretical physicist who with to high energy physics and quantum field theory ( QFT ) employed.

Life

Gribow graduated in 1952 from Leningrad, was a Jew not initially employed by the University and was then two years a teacher at a night school. In 1954 he was at the Joffe Institute (then Physico- Technical Institute, PTI) in Leningrad, where he soon de facto ( though not officially ) headed the theoretical division. From the late 1950s he took part in the famous weekly seminars by Lev Landau in Moscow, where he met Isaac Pomeranchuk, with whom he closely befriended and with whom he worked. In 1971, the theory department of the PTI, was at the Gribow, part of the Institute for Nuclear Physics ( LNPI ) in Gatchina in Leningrad. In Leningrad, he led a well in the Soviet Union ( and internationally ) known seminar on quantum field theory and elementary particle physics, but he himself was not allowed to travel abroad for decades. Although he was not an open dissident, but was known as independent and critical spirit .. From 1980 he was professor at the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics in Moscow and from the 1990s, a professor at the Roland Eötvös University in Budapest. He was also, inter alia, In the late 1990s a visiting professor at the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the University of Bonn.

In 1991 he was awarded the Sakurai Prize, he was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Research Award and won ( the first ) 1971 Landau Prize of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

He was married twice and had a son Lenja Gribow, who was an aspiring theoretical physicist but in a climbing accident in the Pamir Mountains was killed, what Gribow hard hit. In his second marriage he was married to the Hungarian Julia Nyiri.

In his honor, awarded by the European Physical Society since 2001, the Gribov Medal.

Work

Gribow took in circles of theoretical physics in the Soviet Union due to its much-admired physical intuition a prominent position, comparable to the Landau in the 1950s and which is also connected to the Landau - Pomeranchuk and Migdal seminar physicist Arkady. He was the founder of an influential school of theoretical elementary particle physicists in Leningrad.

In the late 1950s he developed with Pomeranchuk (after which it is named ), the pomeron concept in the theory of strong interactions, a hypothetical neutral particle, which is to explain the high-energy behavior of the scattering cross sections .. In the 1960s he was one of the leading scientists in the then much- studied Regge theory, it built to a field theory of ( Reggeon Calculus, from 1968 ) and at the same time creating connections to quantum field theories. These studies on the high-energy behavior of the strong interactions, however, were forced from about 1973 through the success of quantum chromodynamics ( QCD) sidelined, located in the region of short distances ( " asymptotic freedom " ) proved readily accessible than perturbatively. But Gribow examined in the 1970s continue to nonperturbative aspects of non abelian gauge theories (Yang -Mills theory). He found there a structure in the space of gauge degrees of freedom, which also existed in lorentzkovarianter gauge fixing ( Gribov Copies, 1977). He was one of the first to instantons interpreted as tunneling solutions topologically different vacuum states in gauge theories, regardless of Gerardus ' t Hooft and about the same time. After Seldowitsch he also took the Hawking radiation in discussions with this long before Hawking anticipated - Seldowitsch did not believe him at the time, however. In the late 1960s Gribow independently developed by Richard Feynman, the parton picture of deep inelastic scattering of hadrons. With Lew Lipatow he developed in 1971 an influential theory of logarithmic corrections in deep inelastic electron scattering on hadrons and high energy experiments with electron-positron annihilation of evolution equations for the structure functions (quark and gluon distribution functions ) of hadrons, one of the foundations of perturbative quantum chromodynamics ( QCD) were ( DGLAP equations). With Alexander Migdal 1968 he examined the scaling behavior at phase transitions with ideas from quantum field theory. One focus of his interest in later years were confinement mechanisms in non- Abelian gauge theories, where he took the view that this as is often assumed the non -Abelian gauge theories can not be explained by instanton or monopole solutions of the classical versions, he led them rather to a similar shielding mechanism back, which also results in quantum electrodynamics to an upper limit for the nuclear charge: a higher charge produces there supercritical fields with spontaneous vacuum polarization ( creation of electron -positron pairs ), from which the nuclear charge is reduced. Numerous theoretical concepts are named after Gribov (eg Froissart - Gribov representation in the Regge theory ).

After the change-over to the Landau Institute in Moscow, he was relatively isolated in spite of his reputation, as he continued to follow their own ideas for quark confinement ( his main area of ​​work since the mid- 1970s) and the current in the 1980s ideas of string theory and integrable (two-dimensional ) field theories faced reserved. Instead, he organized in Moscow in the early 1980s seminars in Odessa.

Writings

• The theory of complex angular momentum, Cambridge University Press, 2003 ( lectures Gribows 1969 )
• Gribov ' Orsay Lectures on Confinement ", Part 1, 1992, Part 2, Part 3
• " QCD at large and short distances ," 1998, last work on the confinement problem and "theory of quark confinement " in 1999, the second part of the work, also posthumously
• J. Nyiri (Editor) The Gribov theory of quark confinement, World Scientific 2001 ( reprints of Gribov, Introduction A. Vainshtein )