Hugh David Politzer

Hugh David Politzer ( born August 31, 1949 in New York) is an American physicist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2004.

Politzer went to the Bronx High School of Science, which he left in 1966 to study at the University of Michigan. There he made in 1969 a bachelor's degree and a doctorate in 1974 at Sidney Coleman at Harvard University. He then went to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech ) in Pasadena, where he is currently Professor of Theoretical Physics.

In his first published work, which was published in 1973, Politzer described the phenomenon of asymptotic freedom, which states that the strong interaction between quarks is the weaker the closer they are to each other. If two quarks are extremely close together, the interaction is so weak that they behave almost as free particles. This theory (which was formulated independently by Frank Wilczek and his doctoral supervisor David Gross) was an important step in the development of quantum chromodynamics. In 1974 he said to Thomas Appelquist requires the existence of charmonium.

In 2004, Politzer together with Gross and Wilczek Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction. In 2003 he received the High Energy and Particle Physics Prize of the EPS.

Politzer appeared in a supporting role as the physicist Robert Serber on in the movie Fat Man and Little Boy ( with Paul Newman), who has the Manhattan Project and the development of the atomic bomb on the topic.