Lochlainn O'Raifeartaigh

Lochlainn O'Raifeartaigh ( born March 11, 1933, Clontarf, Dublin; † 18 November 2000) was an Irish theoretical physicist.

O'Raifeartaigh was the son of a high official in the Irish Department of Education, which was responsible for the development of universities. He studied at University College Dublin, where he was also a member of a society for the care of Gaelic ( next he spoke fluent German and French). After graduating in 1956, he studied at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Study at John Synge and Erwin Schrödinger. There he dealt with general relativity. In 1960 he received his PhD with Walter Heitler at the University of Zurich ( "Non Local Field Theories " ) and was then assistant professor at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Study. After an encounter with ECG Sudarshan in Bern in 1963, he was invited to give lectures on group theory at the Mathematical Science Institute in Madras and was then 1964-1968 at Sudarshan at Syracuse University in the U.S.. 1967/8 he was at Princeton and from 1968 professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Dublin at the Institute for Advanced Study.

O'Raifeartaigh was known as an expert on the application of group-theoretic methods in elementary particle physics, in particular for his " no-go theorem " of 1965, the non-trivial connections internal symmetries and the space-time symmetries of the Poincaré group banned. This theorem established his reputation as they corresponding experiments, which were then taken frequently, a tie break ( a way out was found only with the development of supersymmetry ). In 1975, he wrote a widely acclaimed work on supersymmetry breaking. A possible mechanism for this is named after him. He showed that at least three chiral superfields (as the supersymmetric counterpart of Higgs fields) were necessary to do so. In the 1980s he examined, inter alia, Kac -Moody and W - algebras and magnetic monopoles in non -Abelian gauge theories, and in the 1990s, the Seiberg -Witten theory. He has published over 200 scientific papers with more than 60 co-authors.

He was also interested in historical aspects and wrote the book, The Dawning of Gauge Theory.

In 2000 he received the Wigner Medal and 1998 Humboldt Research Award. He was since 1962 Member of the Royal Irish Academy of Sciences and was a member of the Academia Europaea.

He was married in 1958 and had five children.

Writings

• Group Structure of Gauge Theories. Cambridge University Press, 1985, ISBN 0521347858
• The Dawning of Gauge Theory. Princeton University Press, 1997