Reinhard Oehme

Reinhard Oehme ( born January 26, 1928 in Wiesbaden, † between September 29 and October 4, 2010 in Chicago ) was a German -born theoretical physicist. Oehme was known for the discovery of non - conservation of charge conjugation in conjunction with parity violation, for the formulation and the proof of hadronic dispersion relations for the " Edge of the Wedge Theorem" in the theory of functions of several complex variables, the Goldberger - Miyazawa - Oehme - sum rule, the reduction of quantum field theories, the Oehme -Zimmermann - Superkovergenz relations for correlation functions in gauge theories, and for many other posts.

• 2.1 dispersion relations, GMO sum rule, and " Edge of the Wedge Theorem"
• 2.2 charge conjugation as a non- invariant
• 2.3 Propagators and OZ - superconvergence relations
• 2.4 Reduction of quantum field theories
• 2.5 Further contributions

Biography

Reinhard Oehme was the son of Dr. phil. Reinhold Oehme and Katharina Kraus born. After graduating from high school in Rheingau Geisenheim am Rhein - the first school near Wiesbaden opened after the war - he began the study of physics and mathematics at the Goethe University in Frankfurt and received his diploma in 1948 as a student of Erwin Madelung. Then he went to Göttingen to the Max Planck Institute for Physics as a student of Werner Heisenberg, who was also a professor at the University of Göttingen. Beginning of 1951 Oehme was then a PhD in Heisenberg at the University of Göttingen. In the same year, Heisenberg asked him together with Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker to travel to Brazil, specifically in connection with the founding of the " Instituto de Física teórica " ( IFT) in São Paulo, the Heisenberg, probably in view of the tense situation in Europe, looked for a possible branch of the Max Planck Institute. On November 5, 1952, he married in São Paulo, Brazil, Mafalda Pisani, who was born as the daughter of Giacopo Pisani and Wanda d' Alfonso in Berlin. Mafalda died in August of 2004 in Chicago. From Brazil Oehme came back to his assistant at the Max Planck Institute in Göttingen. In 1954, Oehme with recommendation from Heisenberg to his friend Enrico Fermi an offer for a Research Associate position at the University of Chicago, where he worked at the Institute for Nuclear Studies. The main findings from this period are described below works. In the fall of 1956 Oehme went as a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and returned in 1958 returned to the University of Chicago as a professor in the Department of Physics, and the Enrico Fermi Institute for Nuclear Studies. Since 1998 he is Professor Emeritus.

Visiting Professorships

• University of Maryland, 1957; University of Vienna in 1961; Imperial College London, 1963-1964; University of Karlsruhe, 1974, 1975, 1977; University of Tokyo in 1976, 1988; Research Institute of Fundamental Physics, Kyoto University, 1976.

As a visiting scientist

• Instituto de Física teórica, São Paulo, Brasil; Brookhaven National Laboratory; Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley; CERN; International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Trieste; Max Planck Institute for Physics, Munich.

Prizes and awards

Working

Dispersion relations, GMO sum rule, and " Edge of the Wedge Theorem"

In 1954 in Chicago, Oehme studied the analytic properties of scattering amplitudes in quantum field theories. He found the essential fact that particle-particle and antiparticle -particle amplitudes are connected by analytic continuation in the complex plane of energy variables. These results then led to his work with Marvin Goldberger and Hironari Miyazawa via dispersion relations for the scattering of pi mesons by nucleons, which also includes the Goldberger - Miyazawa - Oehme sum rule. The relations were in good agreement with the experimental results of the Fermi group in Chicago, the Lindenbaum - group in Brookhaven, and other experiments. The GMO sum rule is often used in the analysis of the pion -nucleon system.

Oehme has published a more formal derivation of forward dispersion relations in the framework of local quantum field theory. The proof also applies to gauge theories with " confinement ". To take advantage of the far-reaching results of the theory of functions of several complex variables for the proof of dispersion relations for amplitudes with finite momentum transfer, as well as for the general analytic properties of Green's functions, Oehme has formulated and proved a fundamental theorem. He called it " Edge of the Wedge Theorem" ( " wedge edges theorem "). This work was performed at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in collaboration with Hans Joachim Bremer and husband John Gerald Taylor.

On the basis of the microscopic characteristics of the spectrum of causality and the theorem results in a primary of regularity, which can then be enlarged by analytic continuation. Oehme has presented these results first in the winter semester 1956/57, at the Princeton University Colloquium. One of them independent, diverse and extensive evidence of non- forward dispersion relations was also published by Nikolai Nikolaevich Bogolyubov and employees. The " Edge of the Wedge Theorem" has many applications. For example, you can use it to show that in ( spontaneous ) violation of Lorentz invariance, micro causality ( locality) and positivity of energy to ensure the Lorentz invariance of the energy-momentum spectrum. Oehme also formulated dispersion relations for nucleon - nucleon scattering in collaboration with Marvin Goldberger and Yoichiro Nambu.

Charge conjugation as a non- invariant

On August 7, 1956 Oehme wrote a letter to Chen Ning Yang, in which he shows that the weak interactions should violate the conservation of C ( charge conjugation ) in the case of a positive outcome in the β -decay polarization experiment. Since conservation of P ( parity) leads to the same conditions as C, Oehme concluded that C and P both must be hurt in order to obtain a corresponding asymmetry. In the Brookhaven preprint BNL 2819 their work on parity Tsung- Dao Lee and Yang had assumed that C is maintained. The result of Oehme shows that at the level of the ordinary weak interactions CP relevant symmetry, and not C, and P individually. For example, CP is sufficient for the equality of the decay times of positive and negative pi mesons to meet. This situation discovered by Oehme is fundamental for the later experiments on the problem of CP conservation, and for the discovery of CP violation at much lower interaction strength by James Cronin and Val Fitch.

As indicated above, the letter of Oehme in the book Selected Papers by CN Yang is printed. On the basis of the letter Lee, Oehme and Yang have a more detailed study of the interrelationships of possible non Conditions of P, C and T written, and it also applications to the K - described complex - anti -K. In the work that has been written before the experimental discovery of the P- and C- non-conservation, the possibility of non-conservation of T ( time reversal ) and, assuming the CPT condition, CP is mentioned. In any case, the work is essential for the description of the CP experiments. The non-conservation of C is a fundamental prerequisite for the asymmetry between matter and anti-matter in the universe.

Propagators and OZ - superconvergence relations

On the basis of analytical properties and methods of the renormalization group led Oehme, in collaboration with Wolfhart Zimmermann, a general structural analysis of gauge field propagators by. For theories in which the number of matter fields ( flavors ) is below a fixed limit, he found it super - convergence relations. This " Oehme -Zimmermann - relations " be a connection of properties of the theory at high and low energies (large and small distances, asymptotic freedom and confinement). The results for propagators are only dependent on general principles essentially.

Reduction of quantum field theories

As a general method for reducing the number of parameters in quantum field theories, Oehme and Zimmermann have introduced a theory of reduction of couplings. The method is an application of the renormalization, and as the derivative of corresponding general symmetries. In some cases, solutions of the reduction equations that do not directly correspond to a new symmetry, but come from another characteristic feature of the theory exist. In certain multi- parameter theories are obtained by reduction supersymmetric theories, and has to have so examples of the occurrence of this symmetry explicitly introduced without it before. The reduction method has many applications, theoretical as well as phenomenological

More Articles

More Articles by Oehme deal with complex angular momentum, rising cross sections, Broken symmetries, Stromalgebren and weak interactions and others.