Yuri Golfand

Yuri Abramovich golfand ( born January 10, 1922 in Kharkov, † February 17, 1994 in Jerusalem, English spelling Yuri golfand ) was a Russian theoretical physicist, one of the discoverers of supersymmetry.

Golfand studied mathematics and physics at the University of Kharkov (Ukrainian: Kharkov), interrupted by military service in World War II ( as an aircraft mechanic ). After the war he continued his studies ( mathematics ) in Leningrad, where he graduated in 1946 and did his PhD a year later. He then worked at a research institute of Electrical Engineering before 1951, the theory group of Igor Tamm at the Lebedev Institute ( FIAN ) joined in Moscow. He worked in quantum field theory, where he, inter alia, In 1959 a work on renormalization wrote under the assumption that the four-dimensional momentum space possessed a constant ( non-zero ) curvature. In 1970, he was with his students Evgeni Likhtman an extension of the Poincare algebra by means of spinors, which provided the first example of a four-dimensional supersymmetry theory (in this case a variant of the extended supersymmetric quantum electrodynamics). A little later, D. Volkov and VP Akulov resulted in Kharkov also a four-dimensional supersymmetry. The Russian work then found little attention, and the real expansion of supersymmetry began only in 1974 with the work of Julius Wess and Bruno Zumino in the West. Today the theory, which was introduced by the pioneers of string theory (in the context of a world- sheet supersymmetry, so first in two dimensions) André Neveu, John Schwarz and Pierre Ramond around 1971 is considered as an important building block of a suspected comprehensive theory of elementary particles and their interactions ( GUTs ), for example, within string theory ( superstrings ), which has as a candidate for GUTs supersymmetry a prerequisite.

Shortly after this seminal work, he was discharged in 1973 at the FIAN. After he had asked for an exit visa to Israel, he found no other position as a scientist in the Soviet Union. In 1980 he was to strong pressure from foreign physicists, for example, of the APS, again set at FIAN (but not in theory department ). Only with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990 he was able to leave with his family to Israel. He spent his last years in Haifa, with a research contract from the Technion. He died of a stroke.

In 1990 he received the Tamm Prize of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.