Kenneth G. Wilson

Kenneth Geddes Wilson ( born June 8, 1936 in Waltham, Massachusetts, † June 15, 2013 in Saco, Maine) was an American physicist and Nobel laureate.

Life

Wilson, a son of Edgar Bright Wilson, studied as a Putnam Fellow at Harvard University and his doctorate in 1961 at Caltech with Murray Gell-Mann. As a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, he was then working at CERN. In 1963 he became an assistant professor at Cornell University in New York and in 1970 full professor. In 1985 he became head of the national supercomputer centers in the U.S. at Cornell. From 1988 to 2008 he worked at the Ohio State University.

Wilson received the 1982 Nobel Prize in Physics " for his theory of critical phenomena at phase transitions " ( in the official eulogy also the important contributions of, among others Ben Widom, Valery Pokrovsky, Leo Kadanoff and Michael Fisher are appreciated to this field ). Wilson made ​​major contributions to the development of the theory of renormalization group, he used both in statistical mechanics and in quantum field theory. Through its lattice formulation of quantum chromodynamics he founded the lattice gauge theory. The Wilson loop (also called Wilson -Line ), which in lattice gauge theories as a kind of test - observable ( order parameter ) is used with the path integral of the gauge vector field over closed paths (loops ) as a phase factor, is named after him. Within the lattice gauge theory Wilson is also named for the imported him from Wilson fermions and the Wilson action. Also, the method of the operator product expansion ( operator product expansion) in quantum field theory has been developed by him. But he has not only worked on different areas, but also seemingly abstract methods constructively applied to concrete problems, such as the method of renormalization to the solution of the Kondo problem, where he was very open for numerical methods early.

In 1973 he received the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics, 1975, the Boltzmann Medal. In 1980 he was awarded, along with Michael Fisher and Leo Kadanoff, the Wolf Prize for Physics. In 1982 followed the Nobel Prize for Physics. In 1993 he received the first Aneesur -Rahman price.

His doctoral include Roman Jackiw and Michael Peskin.

Wilson was married.

Writings (selection )

  • Problems in physics with many scales of length. In: Scientific American. August 1979 German The renormalization group. In: Scientific American. Oktober 1979.
  • The renormalization group (RG) and critical phenomena 1 In: Physical Review B. Volume 4, 1971, p 3174th
  • The renormalization group: critical phenomena and the Kondo problem-. In: Reviews of modern physics. Volume 47, 1975, p 773-839.
  • With M. Fisher: Critical exponents in 3.99 dimensions. In: Physical Review Letters. Volume 28, 1972, p 240
  • Non- lagrangian models in current algebra. In: Physical Review. Volume 179, 1969, pp. 1499-1512 ( operator product expansion).
  • Model of coupling constant renormalisation. In: Physical Review D. Volume 2, 1970, pp. 1438-1472.
  • Operator product expansions and anomalous dimensions in Thirring model. In: Physical Review D. Volume 2, 1970, pp. 1473-1477.
  • Anomalous dimensions and breakdown of scale invariance in perturbation theory. In: Physical Review D. Volume 2, 1970, pp. 1478-1493.
  • RG and strong interactions. In: Physical Review D. Volume 3, 1971, pp. 1818-1846.
  • Confinement of quarks. In: Physical Review D. Volume 10, 1974, p 2445-2459.
471977
de