Benjamin W. Lee

Benjamin Lee is a redirect to this article. For the musician see Ben Lee (singer-songwriter) , for the badminton player see Benny Lee .

Benjamin Whisoh Lee

Benjamin Whisoh Lee (born January 1, 1935 in Keijō , Chōsen , Japanese Empire , † June 16, 1977 in Kewanee , Illinois , United States ) was a South Korean-American theoretical physicist who dealt with elementary particle physics.

Life

Lee studied chemical engineering from 1952 at Seoul National University . In 1953 he went to the USA, where he studied at the "Miami University of Ohio" and at the University of Pittsburgh (Master's degree in 1958). In 1960 he received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania . In 1961 he was an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, an associate professor in 1963 and a professor in 1965. In between he was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1961/2 . 1966 to 1976 he was a professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook , where Chen Ning Yang was his boss. He had been an American since 1968. In 1971 he went to the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory , where he was head of the theory department from 1974. At the same time he was a professor at the University of Chicago .

He died in a car accident in 1977 at the age of only 42 when his car was rammed on the highway by an oncoming truck that broke the barrier to the opposite lane. His wife and two children were only slightly injured. Lee was on his way to a summer Fermilab program committee meeting in Aspen .

Lee was a Sloan and Guggenheim Fellow and a Fellow of the American Physical Society and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1976 .

research

In the 1960s he dealt with the then much studied current algebras (with phenomenological “chiral” Lagrangian functions and symmetries such as SU (6)) of elementary particle physics. This resulted in his book "Chiral Dynamics" from 1972 (Verlag Gordon and Breach). In the early 1970s he investigated the behavior of spontaneously broken models when renormalized . After t'Hooft's proof of the renormalizability of Yang-Mills theories with spontaneous symmetry breaking in 1972, he gave an alternative proof (for Abelian gauge theories), which was essentially responsible for convincing theorists of the validity of t'Hooft's method. With E. Abers he wrote an important review article on gauge theories, which was widely read at the time. With Mary Gaillard he investigated the properties of the charm quarks , which were discovered shortly afterwards in 1974, and gave an explanation of the selection rule for nonleptonic weak decays, for example of kaons in the context of QCD. ${\displaystyle \Delta I={\frac {1}{2}}}$

Web links

• Obituary at the Fermilab
• Moo-Young Han: Benjamin Whiso Lee: Korea's Oppenheimer? ( Memento from February 10, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
• Obituary by Quigg and Weinberg, physics today

Individual evidence

1. ^ Abers, Lee, Gauge Theories , Physics Reports, Vol. 9, 1974, p. 1
2. ^ Gaillard, Lee, rule for non-leptonic decays in asymptotically free gauge theories, Phys. Rev. Lett., 33, 1974, 108. Guido Altarelli and Luciano Maiani did this independently . ${\displaystyle \Delta I={\frac {1}{2}}}$