John Clive Ward

John Clive Ward ( born August 1, 1924 in London, † 6 May 2000) was a British physicist.

Ward studied at Oxford, where he earned his doctorate at MHL Pryce. He was in the United States, inter alia, before emigrating at Princeton University, Carnegie Institute of Technology and Johns Hopkins University in 1967 to Australia and Professor at Macquarie University was.

Ward is known today mainly because of two articles published in Physical Review in 1950 in which he named after him identity (" Ward identity " today " Ward - Takahashi identity " in addition by Yasushi Takahashi ) between the pulse - derivative of the electron propagator and the effective electron-photon interaction vertex described. With such identities he could prove the equality or disappearance of various renormalization constants, concluding a gap in the proof of the renormalizability of quantum electrodynamics by Freeman Dyson. Similar identities are now also used to prove the renormalizability of other gauge theories.

Ward was also a pioneer of the standard model. In an essay with Abdus Salam in 1964, he investigated a unified theory of electroweak interactions with gauge group SU (2) x U (1) (as well as later Steven Weinberg ), with weak mixing angle between the photon and the neutral Z- boson, but without spontaneous symmetry breaking.

He also worked in the early 1950s about superfluids, quantum mechanical many-body theory ( with JM Luttinger, Renfrey Potts, Elliott Montroll ) and the Ising model (eg he developed with Mark Kac in 1952, a combinatorial solution of the Ising model ) ..

Ward was also involved in work for the British hydrogen bomb and worked in Australia on ideas to enrich uranium (Ward process).

Ward last lived in Vancouver and died after returning from a South Seas trip. Ward 1965 Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1980 he was awarded the Guthrie Medal of the Institute of Physics, 1982 Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics and 1983, the Hughes Medal of the Royal Society.