Ernst Stueckelberg
Ernst Carl Gerlach Stückelberg ( born 1 February 1905 in Basel, † September 4, 1984 in Geneva) was a Swiss mathematician and physicist.
Life and work
He was born the son of the lawyer Alfred Stückelberg and Alice born of Breidenbach in Basle and baptized with the name Johann Melchior Ernst Karl Gerlach. Later he called himself Ernst Carl Gerlach. The run since the 14th century surnames Stickelberger changed his grandfather Ernst Stückelberg, a well-known history painter, in Stückelberg, in many publications written as Stueckelberg. Since his maternal grandfather was allowed to transfer for lack of male offspring with imperial approval his title to the children of his daughter, Ernst Carl Gerlach Stückelberg 1911 received the new name of Stückelberg Breidenbach to Breidenstein and Melsbach.
Stückelberg visited the Humanistic Gymnasium in Basel and studied, initially with a focus on experimental physics, including Arnold Sommerfeld in Munich. He received his doctorate in 1927 at the University of Basel under August Hagenbach, the son of the Basel physicist Eduard Hagenbach - Bischoff. Topic of the dissertation was an experimental work on cathode rays. After that he went to Princeton University to study with Arthur Holly Compton, where he had already turned to theoretical physics. He became friends with Philip Morse and both were executed leads to the Michigan Summer School 1928 by Hendrik Anthony Kramers quantum mechanics. In 1930 he became assistant professor in Princeton and attended Morse Sommerfeld in Munich and Cambridge. During the Depression, the financing of research centers in the U.S. was difficult, and he went back to Switzerland in 1932, where he completed his habilitation at the University of Zurich with Gregor Wentzel. In 1935 he became a professor at the University of Geneva, where he remained until his retirement in 1975. At the same time, he was from 1956 professor at the University of Lausanne.
In 1934 he designed a covariant perturbative treatment of quantum field theory, although little attention was paid but nevertheless excited the attention of Wolfgang Pauli. 1935, regardless of Hideki Yukawa and probably before that, he explained the strong interactions of the nucleons by the exchange of vector bosons ( he published this does not, as Paul explained this ridiculous ). In 1938 he designed a renormalizable theory with massive vector boson ( Stueckelberg field ), where he underlined the need to maintain a gauge symmetry. In 1941 he suggested to formally describe the positron as an electron of negative energy that runs backward in time. This interpretation, which bypassed the idea of positron occupied as holes of a Dirac Sea electron states of negative energy of the vacuum, later became independent, and prepared with much greater effect, by Richard Feynman ( Feynman - Stückelberg interpretation ). Stückelberg used his interpretation even for performing simple Feynman diagrams before Feynman, who did so until 1947. In a 1943 submitted for Physical Review, but rejected, work he set up a program for the renormalization of quantum electrodynamics. He took it anticipated much of the later work of Feynman, Schwinger and Tomonaga that this brought in the Nobel Prize.
In 1951, he discovered together with the mathematician Andre Petermann renormalization group (before Murray Gell-Mann and Francis Low)
Later Stückelberg was temporarily affected at a ( repeatedly occur in spurts ) mental illness and was therefore treated with electric shocks. There was, for example, reported that he had spoken during his lectures with his dog when he was not getting anywhere.
His PhD is one of Constantin Piron.
Awards
In 1976 he received the Max Planck Medal.