Nathan Isgur

Nathan Isgur ( born May 24, 1947 in South Houston, Texas; † 24 July 2001) was a Canadian- American theoretical physicist.

Isgur grew up in South Houston and studied biology with a scholarship at Caltech, where he switched to physics, and in 1968 received his bachelor's degree. While working for his doctorate at the University of Berkeley, he received a draft notice in the Vietnam War, before he dodged to Canada. He earned his doctorate at the University of Toronto at REPugh 1974. He participated in a Canadian citizen and was able to enter the U.S. again after the general amnesty under President Jimmy Carter. In 1976 he was Assistant Professor and then Professor in Toronto. He was one of the leaders of the Canadian contribution to the planned electron storage ring at Fermilab CHEER, but was then abandoned in favor of the Tevatron in the 1980s. In 1990 he moved back to the U.S., where he established the theory group at Jefferson Lab ( with the accelerator CEBAF at Newport News) and directed. At the same time he became a professor at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg ( Virginia). In his bone cancer was diagnosed in 1996, which he died five years later.

From the mid-1970s he worked on quark physics, specifically excited baryons in a nonrelativistic quark model with QCD corrections, often in collaboration with Gabriel Charles of the Canadian University of Guelph. With Mark Wise, he developed a QCD approximation for heavy quarks, the HQET (Heavy Quark Effective Theory), with the decays of hadrons with such heavy quarks (like Charm, Bottom, Top) were calculated.

Isgur was a member of the Royal Society of Canada and the American Physical Society. He was awarded the Herzberg Prize and the Rutherford Medal. In 2001 he received the Sakurai Prize with Mark Wise and Mikhail Voloshin.