Wolfhart Zimmermann

Wolfhart Zimmermann ( born February 17, 1928 in Freiburg im Breisgau ) is a German theoretical physicist.

Zimmermann studied at the Albert -Ludwigs- University of Freiburg im Breisgau and started his PhD thesis in topology ( " A cohomology theory of topological spaces " ) with Emanuel Sperner. After this was wegberufen, he closed it in 1950 when Wilhelm Süss. In the 1950s, he was in Göttingen one of the pioneers of the mathematical quantum field theory, developed in collaboration with Kurt Symanzik and Harry Lehmann " LSZ theory." 1962 to 1974 he was a professor at New York University. 1974 and 1996 he was Director of the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich, where he is "Director Emeritus ." He was also since 1977 honorary professor at the Technical University of Munich. He was, inter alia, to residencies the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (1957 /8 and 1960/1 ), at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University, the University of Chicago and at the IHES in Paris.

In addition to his work on the LSZ formalism it is also for the development of the Bogolyubov - Parasiuk - Renormierungsschemas (also known BPHZ - renormalization scheme named after Klaus Hepp and Zimmermann). Together with Kenneth Wilson, he was one of the pioneers in the application of the operator product expansion in quantum field theory. With Reinhard Oehme from the Enrico Fermi Institute in Chicago (with whom he already worked in Göttingen in the 1950s), he worked on the reduction of coupling parameters with renormalization group and led a super- convergence relations for propagators in Yang-Mills theories, the connections between the limiting cases of high energy (eg asymptotic freedom ) and low energy ( presumed confinement) manufacture.

In 1992 he received the Max Planck Medal.

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