Kurt Symanzik
Kurt Symanzik ( born November 23, 1923 in Lyck, East Prussia, † October 25, 1983 in Hamburg ) was a German physicist who dealt with quantum field theory ( QFT ).
Life and work
Symanzik grew up in Königsberg in Prussia and began his studies in physics in 1946 at the Ludwig- Maximilians- University of Munich, but moved shortly thereafter to Werner Heisenberg to the georg- August-Universität Göttingen. With his fellow students Wolfhart Zimmermann and Harry Lehmann, he began a collaboration that to important formalisms a mathematically rigorous version of quantum field theory led in the 1950s ( Lehmann- Symanzik -Zimmermann theory, short LSZ theory, she pushes scattering amplitudes by vacuum expectation values of the field operators from ). The three were later therefore apostrophized by Wolfgang Pauli as " Field Club ".
In 1954 he received his doctorate in Heisenberg with the influential work The Schwinger functional in quantum field theory, where it refers to the recently published epochal work of Julian Seymour Schwinger.
From 1955 to 1962 he worked among others the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and at CERN (where he dealt among other things with the dispersion relations) before accepting a professorship at the Courant Institute in 1962 in New York City. Here he developed ( also ideas of Schwinger following), the Euclidean quantum field theory, ie, a formal transformation from Minkowski space to Euclidean space, makes the connection between QFT and statistical mechanics significantly. Vacuum expectation values of operators corresponding correlation functions, etc. These ideas of "constructive QFT " have become standard later in the lattice gauge theories.
In 1968 he moved as a senior scientist at the DESY in Hamburg and examined the mathematical background for the then newly discovered scaling behavior of quantum field theories ( Callan - Symanzik equation) as well as spontaneous symmetry breaking in QFT. He took up the renormalization group ideas of Kenneth Wilson. In particular, he gave the first models for asymptotic freedom, which were soon proved it in quantum chromodynamics by David Gross, David Politzer and Frank Wilczek. From the 1970s he worked on lattice gauge theories.
He received in 1981 the Max Planck medal of the DPG.