Gerald Guralnik

Gerald Stanford Guralnik ( born September 17, 1936 in Cedar Falls, Iowa) is an American theoretical physicist.

Guralnik studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( bachelor's degree ) and received his PhD in 1964 at Harvard University ( where he heard among others, Julian Schwinger ) with Walter Gilbert. From 1965 he was at the University of Rochester. Later he was a professor at Brown University.

He is best known for his work with Carl R. Hagen (whom he had known as a fellow student from MIT and with whom he already published when they were still students ) and Tom Kibble via spontaneous symmetry breaking as a method of mass production of vector bosons in Yang-Mills theories, an important basis of the theory of electroweak interactions and the Standard Model. Regardless succeeded in doing so also Peter Higgs, François Englert, Robert Brout. At the time the work was Guralnik as a Fellow of the National Science Foundation post-doc at Kibble at Imperial College, and later Hagen came about. Although the work was independent and complete than those of their competitors, led to the fact that Higgs ( Englert and Brout and ) first published to the fact that a majority of the Higgs recognition (expressed in the name Higgs mechanism ) was given. Mid-1960s, the theory was self-assessed predominantly negative, for example, by Werner Heisenberg as Guralnik on a trip organized by this 1965 conference in Munich recited. In Guralniks memories, this was one reason why he turned to other topics, just as the late 1960s, the electroweak unified theory of Steven Weinberg and Abdus Salam ( the mind at Imperial College in part with John Clive Ward worked ) was developed.

Later he dealt among other things with numerical algorithms in quantum field theory. In the 2000s, he participated in a project to develop a computer with structures modeled after the human brain (replacement Brain Project ).

He was Sloan Fellow and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. 1969/70 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study.

In 2010 he received the Sakurai Prize with Higgs, Englert, Brout, Hagen and Kibble.

Writings

• The History of the Guralnik, Hagen and Kibble development of the Theory of Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking and Gauge Particles, 2009
• With CR Hagen, TWB Kibble: Global conservation laws and massless particles. In: Physical Review Letters. Volume 13, 1964, p 585 The works by Guralnik, Hagen, Kibble, Higgs, Englert, Brout 1964 in Physical Review Letters