Richard Dalitz

Richard Henry Dalitz ( born February 28, 1925 in Dimboola, Victoria (Australia ), † 13 January 2006) was an Australian physicist, known for his work in the field of particle physics.

Life

Dalitz studied mathematics and physics at the University of Melbourne. In his doctoral thesis on " zero- zero transitions in nuclei ", he worked from 1946 at the University of Cambridge, Cecil Powell at Bristol University and since 1949 with Rudolf Peierls at Birmingham University. 1953 Dalitz went to Cornell University, in 1956, he became a professor at the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago.

In 1963 he went back to England, this time to the University of Oxford. Among his pupils there later CERN Director Christopher Llewellyn Smith belonged. 1990 Dalitz became Professor Emeritus, but continued to work on physical problems.

Work

In his doctoral thesis, Dalitz worked with nuclear transitions. However, he was involved in a project to cosmic radiation in Bristol, were studied in the kaons. In 1951 he explored then the decay of neutral pions. The resulting next to a photon electron-positron pair is named after him Dalitz pair. In 1954, he introduced a scatter plot of the invariant masses in Dreikörperzerfällen, which is now called the Dalitz diagram and is a standard tool of particle physics. In these experiments, he made ​​important early findings on parity violation.

In the 1960s he was a pioneer in the field of models of the behavior of quarks in baryons. With Avraham Gal, he explored hypernuclei. By Gary Goldstein, he made important preliminary to the discovery of the top quark.

According to him, Leonardo Castillejo and Freeman Dyson, the CDD poles are named in the theory of the strong interaction.

Honors

1960 Dalitz was elected as a member ( "Fellow" ) to the Royal Society, the 1975 Hughes Medal and 1982, the Royal Medal awarded him.