Benjamin W. Lee

Benjamin W iso Lee ( born January 1, 1935 in Keijo, Chosen, former Empire of Japan, South Korea today, † June 16, 1977 in Kewanee, Illinois, United States ) was a South Korean -born theoretical physicist who worked on elementary particle physics.

Life

Lee studied from 1952 Chemical Engineering at Seoul National University. In 1953 he went to the USA where he studied at the " Miami University of Ohio " and at the University of Pittsburgh ( master's degree, 1958). 1960 he earned his doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania. 1961 he was assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, 1963 Associate Professor and Professor in 1965. between, he played 1961/2 at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. 1966 to 1976 he was professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where Chen Ning Yang was his boss. since 1968, he was Americans. 1971 he went to the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, where he worked from 1974 head of the theory department. Simultaneously he was a professor at the University of Chicago.

He died in 1977 with only 42 years in a car accident when his car was on the highway by an oncoming truck, which broke through the limit to the opposite lane, rammed. His wife and two children suffered only minor injuries. Lee was on his way to a summer meeting of the Fermilab Program Committee in Aspen.

Lee was Sloan and Guggenheim Fellow and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Research

In the 1960s, he worked with the then much- studied Stromalgebren ( with phenomenological " chiral " Lagrangian and symmetries like SU ( 6) ) of elementary particle physics. The result was his book " Chiral Dynamics " of 1972. Early 1970s he investigated the behavior of spontaneously broken models with renormalization. After t'Hoofts proof of the renormalizability of Yang-Mills theories with spontaneous symmetry breaking in 1972, he gave an alternative proof ( for abelian gauge theories ), which was substantially responsible to convince theorists of the validity of t'Hoofts method. With E. Abers he wrote an important, then much read reviews on gauge theories ( " Gauge Theories ", Physics Reports Bd.9, 1974, p.1). With Mary Gaillard he examined properties of the charm quark, discovered shortly after 1974.