Mark B. Wise

Mark Brian Wise ( born November 9, 1953 in Montreal) is a Canadian- American theoretical physicist.

Wise studied at the University of Toronto ( Bachelor's degree in 1976, master's degree, 1977) and at Stanford University, where he received his doctorate in 1980 at Fred Gilman. From 1980 to 1983 he was a Junior Fellow at Harvard University. Since 1983 he is at Caltech, where he is a professor of high energy physics at the time John A. McCone.

Wise is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 1984 to 1987 he was a Sloan Fellow. In 2001 he received the Sakurai Prize with Nathan Isgur and Mikhail Voloshin.

In the 1980s he busied himself, partly in cooperation with Gilman, with the quark model and predictions from it. He is known also treated for the development of the effective theory of heavy quarks ( HQET, Heavy Quark Effective Theory), an approximation of quantum chromodynamics ( QCD), in which the heavy quarks (like charm, bottom and top ) as sources of static, non- relativistic fields are considered as the atomic nuclei in the quantum mechanics of the atom. This results in an effective field theory can be developed in the following the inverse quark mass. Because of the size of their mass the sort of heavy quark makes no big difference (Heavy Quark Symmetry ). With this theory, quantitative calculations in a not previously treatable area of QCD could be carried out, eg in the decays of hadrons with Bottom and Charm Flavor.

Wise also dealt with cosmology and financial mathematics.

Writings

• With Lynn Trainor: From Concept to Mathematical Physical Structure: an Introduction to Theoretical Physics. 1979
• Aneesh V. Manohar with: Heavy Quark Physics. 2000
• Wise: Heavy Quark Physics. Les Houches Lectures 1998
• Wise: Heavy Flavour Theory - to Overview. 1993