Berthold Stech

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Berthold Stech (born December 8, 1924 in Karlsruhe ) is a German physicist. He was a professor at Heidelberg University and dealt with elementary particle physics .

After military service and imprisonment in World War II , he studied physics, chemistry and mathematics in Heidelberg from 1946 with his diploma in 1950 and his doctorate in 1951 under Johannes Hans Daniel Jensen . Under Jensen he dealt with gamma radiation transitions between nuclear states with a high difference in angular momentum quantum number. He then worked as an assistant at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, guest lecturer in Trondheim in 1954 and at Caltech in 1957/58 (with Murray Gell-Mann, among others ). In 1956 he completed his habilitation and in 1957 became associate professor and full professor for theoretical physics in Heidelberg in 1960. He refused calls to Bonn, Vienna and Karlsruhe. Stech was director of the Institute for Theoretical Physics for a long time. In 1970/71 he was Dean of the Faculty of Physics and Astronomy, and in 1991 he retired.

He dealt with chiral symmetry , the influence of quantum chromodynamics on the electroweak interaction , quark structure of hadrons and meson decays (also with heavy quarks), neutrino physics and GUT . In 1955, together with Jensen, he postulated a chiral symmetry for the weak interaction (Stech-Jensen transformation), which was criticized at the time by Murray Gell-Mann , among others , but then a few years later part of the VA theory of the weak interaction by Richard Feynman and Gell -Mann (as well as Robert Marshak and George Sudarshan ) became. Stech even had the idea for the VA theory in 1957, but was dissuaded from it again in a conversation with Gell-Mann. The chiral symmetry (as an approximation for vanishing masses or masses that are negligible in the energy range under consideration) was also used in other areas such as strong interaction.

In 2006 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Hamburg . In 1987 he became a member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences .

From 1966 to 1979 he was on the Scientific Council of the Karlsruhe Nuclear Research Center and in the 1970s and 1980s on the Scientific Council of DESY . He was visiting professor and visiting scholar in the USA (Stanford), Turkey, Denmark, South Africa, Australia and China and at CERN and DESY (cooperation in particular with Argus collaboration at Doris Speicherring).

literature

  • Dagmar Drüll (Ed.): Heidelberger Gelehrtenlexikon , Springer 2009
  • Norbert Straumann : From the Stech-Jensen transformation to the universal VA interaction , In: Archive Hist. Exact Sciences , Vol. 44, 1992, pp. 365-386

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Stech, Jensen, The coupling constants in the theory of β-decay, Z. f. Phys., Vol. 141, 1955, pp. 175-184, Muon decay and β processes, Z. f. Phys., Vol. 141, 1955, p. 403
  2. ↑ Stech, Dosch, biography of Jensen
  3. ^ Marshak, lecture on the 60th birthday of Sudarshan 1991, quoted by Straumann, s. Literature. In their original article, Feynman and Gell-Mann thank you for discussions with Stech.
  4. ↑ DESY 2006
personal data
SURNAME Stech, Berthold
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German physicist
DATE OF BIRTH December 8, 1924
PLACE OF BIRTH Karlsruhe