Murray Gell-Mann

Murray Gell-Mann ( born September 15, 1929 in New York, NY, USA) is an American physicist. He received the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics " for his contributions and discoveries concerning the classification of elementary particles and their interactions ".

Life and work

After leaving school in 1944 Gell-Mann studied until 1948 at Yale University Physics, 1951, he received his doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT ) with Victor Weisskopf. From 1956 until his retirement in 1993 he was a professor at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech ).

Gell-Mann made ​​early fundamental contributions to the theory and classification of strongly interacting particles ( hadrons ). In 1953 he introduced the quantum number " strangeness " for the classification of hadrons. With Abraham Pais he examined the K- meson system, a prime example of a quantum mechanical two-state system.

But also in other fields of quantum field theory and elementary particle physics, he made ​​major contributions. For example, he led in 1954 with Francis Low, the renormalization group one. In a further study with low, he examined what was later called the Bethe -Salpeter equation. With Richard Feynman in 1958 he published a new formulation of the weak interaction ( VA theory).

With Keith Brueckner he examined the many-body problem of the electron gas and Marvin Leonard Goldberger general quantum mechanical scattering theory. With Walter Thirring and Goldberger he led a dispersion relations. In a work by Maurice Lévy, he examined the "chiral model" ( PCAC ( "partially conserved axial vector current" ), Goldberger - Treiman relation). Press this model from the " chiral symmetry " of the strong interaction, and served in the 1960s as phenomenological models to describe them (relations between masses and coupling constants, etc. ).

Gell-Mann and independently of him Juval Ne'eman proposed in 1961 a phenomenological model for the classification of hadrons before, which he first named according to the Noble Eightfold Path in Buddhism " Eightfold Way ", as the number 8 in the model plays a central role. 1964 developed Gell-Mann and George Zweig independently of him from the quark model. At that time, only three quark flavors (up, down, strange ) announced today three more known, but have a much higher mass and therefore could not be detected in the experiments of the 1960s. The corresponding symmetry group with three quark flavors, the SU ( 3) group and the generators are often used to Pauli matrices analogous to the SU (3) are called Gell- Mann matrices.

In Physics, Volume 1, 1964, p 63 (The symmetry group of vector and axial vector currents ), and Physical Review Volume 125, 1962, pp. 1067 he conducted in connection with his work on the quark model "current algebras " a (literally " algebra of currents " ), which were very popular in the 1960s.

In 1972, he led with Harald Fritzsch the color degree of freedom (color) of the quarks, and in a joint work with Henry Leutwyler the full quantum chromodynamics has been introduced.

The late 1970s and in the 1980s he was among other things involved in the development of Grand Unified Theories (GUT). Among other things, he studied with Pierre Ramond and Slansky the possibilities of embedding the color group in GUTs and developed the " Seesaw " mechanism for mass production. He also participated in the development of supergravity, Kaluza-Klein and string theory. In the 1990s he participated in the development of " decoherent histories" interpretation of quantum mechanics ( with James Hartle ).

Since 1993, he has, among other things at the Santa Fe Institute, where he focuses on complex adaptive systems and generally the emergence of complex phenomena from simple laws. He tells it in his popular science book The Quark and the Jaguar.

Gell-Mann is a member of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. In 1959, he was the first winner of the Dannie Heineman Prize.

His doctoral include Kenneth Wilson, Barton Zwiebach and Sidney Coleman.

Prices

Works

  • Gell-Mann and Ne'eman (ed.): The Eightfold Way. 1964 ( reference book on the Eightfold Way )
  • The Quark and the Jaguar. Piper, Munich, 1994, ISBN 349222296X ( popular science book )
  • Selected Papers, World Scientific 2010
Francis E. Low Bethe–Salpeter equation Jellium Gell-Mann matrices Kaluza–Klein theory Committee for Skeptical Inquiry Albert Einstein Medal Gell-Mann–Nishijima formula Group representation Hendrik Lorentz Pieter Zeeman Pierre Curie Gabriel Lippmann Karl Ferdinand Braun Guglielmo Marconi Wilhelm Wien Heike Kamerlingh Onnes Johannes Stark Albert Einstein Niels Bohr James Franck Gustav Ludwig Hertz Jean-Baptiste Perrin C. V. Raman Werner Heisenberg James Chadwick Clinton Davisson George Paget Thomson Enrico Fermi Ernest Lawrence Otto Stern Felix Bloch Max Born Polykarp Kusch John Bardeen Owen Chamberlain Robert Hofstadter Alfred Kastler Martin Ryle Antony Hewish James Rainwater Burton Richter Robert Woodrow Wilson Abdus Salam Steven Weinberg James Cronin Val Logsdon Fitch Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar Carlo Rubbia Simon van der Meer Gerd Binnig Heinrich Rohrer Georg Bednorz Melvin Schwartz Wolfgang Paul Pierre-Gilles de Gennes Bertram Brockhouse Frederick Reines Steven Chu Claude Cohen-Tannoudji Herbert Kroemer Jack Kilby Wolfgang Ketterle Anthony James Leggett David Gross Hugh David Politzer Frank Wilczek Albert Fert Makoto Kobayashi (physicist) Willard Boyle Andre Geim Konstantin Novoselov Saul Perlmutter Brian Schmidt Serge Haroche Peter Higgs Integrated Authority File
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