Sam Treiman
Sam Bard Treiman ( born May 27, 1925 in Chicago, † November 30, 1999 in New York City ) was an American theoretical physicist.
Treiman grew up as the son of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania and Russia in Chicago. He studied from 1942 chemical engineering at Northwestern University and, interrupted by military service in World War II where he repaired radar equipment in the Pacific, Physics at the University of Chicago (then a famous school of elementary particle physicists headed by Enrico Fermi ), where in 1952 he with John Simpson received his doctorate. After that, he was instructor at Princeton University, 1958 Associate Professor and Professor in 1963. From 1977 he was there Eugene V. Higgins Professor of Physics. 1981 to 1987 he was head of the physics department at Princeton. In 1998 he retired. In 1999, he died of leukemia.
Treiman dealt primarily with elementary particle physics, where he remained close to the experiments and new experimental tests suggested. He began with the study of elementary particles in cosmic rays, including from decays of K- mesons on the weak interaction. After the discovery of parity violation in the weak interaction in 1957 he worked with John David Jackson and Wyld the beta decay from this point of new and proposed experiments prior to the discovery of a possible violation of time-reversal invariance. According to him and Marvin Goldberger, the Goldberger - Treiman relation is named, the rate of decay of the charged pion in the weak interaction in electron or muon and corresponding neutrino with the mass of the pion, the weak axial coupling constant (measured in beta decay ) and the pion sets -nucleon coupling constant of the strong interaction g in relationship: (experimental example with 10% accuracy met). This led to the PCAC ( Partially conserved axial vector current) hypothesis of approximate chiral symmetry of the strong interaction, which led to many predictions in the context of " current algebra " in the 1960s, as the Callan - Treiman relations in 1966 at the K -meson decay by Curtis Callan and Treiman itself or the Adler - Weisberger relations ( by Treimans student Stephen Adler ). By David Gross he examined in 1971 ( previously in deep inelastic scattering observed ) Scaling behavior in theories with exchange of gluons as vector mesons, a forerunner of the later more detailed analysis in quantum chromodynamics. In 1972, he struck with Abraham Pais before a test for the existence of neutral currents in the electroweak theory. He wrote an early work on a possible explanation of the baryon asymmetry in the universe from the observed CP violation with Frank Wilczek, Toussaint and Anthony Zee.
Treiman was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 1995 he received the Oersted Medal for his achievements in teaching. Among his doctoral students included Steven Weinberg, Curtis Callan, Stephen Adler, Glennys Farrar, Kazuo Fujikawa, Jonathan Rosner, Nicola Khuri and YS Kim.
He was an advisor to the U.S. government (eg, in plasma physics, physics education and strategic planning) and a member of the JASON Defense Advisory Group. From 1970, he built the theory group at the newly founded Fermilab.
He was married since 1952 with the psychologist Joan Little ( a pupil of Bruno Bettelheim ) and had three children.
Writings
- The Odd Quantum. Princeton University Press, 1999.
- A Life in Particle Physics. Autobiography. In: Annual Review Nuclear Particle Physics. Volume 46, 1996, p 1