Alexandru Proca

Alexandru Proca ( born October 16, 1897 in Bucharest, † December 13, 1955 in Paris) was a Romanian- French physicist.

Proca went to study in Paris, where he earned his diploma in physics at Marie Curie and from 1925 worked at the Radium Institute. It was 1933 when Louis de Broglie received his doctorate in theoretical physics (On the relativistic theory of Dirac 's electron). To test Commission also included Leon Brillouin and Jean Perrin. In 1929 he became editor of the Annales de l'Institut Henri Poincaré. In 1934, he was a Rockefeller Fellowship at the Erwin Schrödinger in Berlin and with Niels Bohr in Copenhagen, where he met Werner Heisenberg and George Gamow.

He developed in 1936 the theory of nuclear forces on the exchange of vector mesons ( spin 1 ). Named after him Proca equation describes a massive spin 1 particle in relativistic quantum mechanics. His theory was used by Hideki Yukawa in the meson theory of nuclear forces, which, however, a spin 0 particle ( pion ) is used. Vector mesons played a role in the theory of nuclear forces and the electroweak interaction later. If one considers, for example, an electrodynamics with massive photons ( the vector bosons are, in other words have spin 1 ), it is described by the Maxwell - Proca equations in the limit of vanishing photon mass in the Maxwell equations.

His theory of vector mesons gained him international recognition. In 1939 he was invited to the Solvay Congress. During World War II he was a short time senior engineer at the French radio and went to Portugal in 1943, where he lectured in Porto, and was from 1943 to 1945 in England. From 1946 he was again in Paris, where he led a well-known seminar, which was a center of interest in elementary particle physics physicists in Paris. In his attempt to get a chair at the Sorbonne and the College de France, he was unsuccessful. From 1950 he organized a colloquium in theoretical physics for the CNRS with the Pierre Auger and 1951 he was a French representative to the International Union of Physics.

From 1953 he was suffering from throat cancer.

In 1931 he became a French citizen.

In 1990 he was made an honorary member of the Romanian Academy of Sciences.