Chen Ning Yang

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Chen Ning Yang (1957)
Chen Ning Yang

Chen Ning Yang ( Chinese  楊振寧  /  杨振宁 , Pinyin Yáng Zhènníng ; born October 1, 1922 in Hefei , China ) is a Chinese physicist and Nobel Prize winner .

Life

Chen Ning Yang, also known as Frank or Franklin , was born on October 1, 1922 in Hefei, the first of five children of mathematics professor Ke Chuan Yang and his wife Meng Hwa Loh Yang . He grew up on the campus of Tsinghua University in Beijing and studied at the United Southwest University in Kunming , where he received his B.Sc. with a thesis on group theory and molecular spectra . The M.Sc. he graduated from Tsinghua University in 1944, which was also located in Kunming during the Sino-Japanese War . After the war he received an American scholarship from Tsinghua University and went to the University of Chicago in January 1946 , where Enrico Fermi exerted a great influence on him. After receiving his doctorate in 1948 on the angular distribution of nuclear reactions and coincidence measurements with Edward Teller , he stayed as an instructor in Chicago for a year before moving to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton ( New Jersey ), where he was appointed professor in 1955. In 1965 he went to Stony Brook , where he spent the rest of his career and stayed there after his retirement .

Yang married Chih Li Tu in 1950 and has three children with her, Franklin (* 1951), Gilbert (* 1958) and Eulee (* 1961). After his first wife died in the winter of 2003, Yang Fan Weng married in December 2004.

Yang became a citizen of the United States in 1964 . He now lives in China, where he received a permanent residence permit in 2004. On September 30, 2015, he gave up American citizenship to become a Chinese citizen. In 2017 he was accepted as a full member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences .

plant

Yang mainly dealt with statistical mechanics and with symmetry principles . He and Lee made the prediction of the possibility of parity violation in the weak interaction , which was then confirmed experimentally by Wu . With Tsung-Dao Lee , with whom he worked and published for years, but with whom he later fell out, he made many other contributions to the theory of elementary particles in the 1950s. The Yang Mills theory (not Abelian gauge theory ) was formulated by him and Robert L. Mills . With it all fundamental interactions of the standard model of physics are described today , apart from gravitation (which can also be described as gauge theory). At that time, the theory was considered mathematically elegant, but exotic, and was examined primarily as a toy model , for example as a model of the quantization of gravity (e.g. Richard Feynman ). In the 1950s he and Lee investigated the Ising model , an exactly solvable model of statistical mechanics. The Yang-Baxter equation (named after him and Rodney Baxter ) is also of great importance in the question of the exact solvability of models of statistical mechanics .

Yang was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1957 together with Tsung-Dao Lee “for fundamental research on the laws of parity which led to important discoveries about elementary particles ”. The American Philosophical Society awarded him in 1993 with their Benjamin Franklin Medal .

Fonts

  • Elementary particles. From the discovery of the electron to the fall of parity , de Gruyter 1972 (German translation of Elementary Particles , Princeton University Press 1961)
  • Selected Papers 1945–1980, with commentary , Freeman 1983, World Scientific 2005

Selected essays:

  • The spontaneous magnetization of a two dimensional Ising model , Physical Review, Volume 85, 1952, p. 808
  • with TD Lee: Statistical theory of equations of state and phase transitions , Part 1,2, Physical Review, Volume 87, 1952, pp. 404, 410 (Yang-Lee zeros)
  • with Robert Mills : Isotopic spin conservation and a generalized gauge invariance , Physical Review, Volume 95, 1954, p. 631 (Yang-Mills theory)
  • with Kerson Huang : Quantum mechanical many body problem with hard sphere interaction , Physical Review, Volume 105, 1957, p. 776
  • with Lee: Many body problem in quantum mechanics and quantum statistical mechanics , Physical Review, Volume 105, 1957, p. 1119
  • with Lee: Low temperature behavior of a dilute Bose gas of hard spheres , Part 1,2, Physical Review, Volume 112, 1958, p. 1419, Volume 113, 1959, p. 1406
  • with Lee: Question of parity conservation in the weak interactions , Physical Review, Volume 104, 1956, p. 254 (parity violation)
  • with Lee: Parity non conservation and a two component theory of the neutrino , Physical Review, Volume 105, 1957, p. 1671
  • with Lee: Implications of the intermediate boson basis of the weak interactions , Physical Review, Volume 119, 1960, p. 1410
  • The law of parity conservation and other symmetry laws of physics , Nobel Lecture 1957
  • with Nina Byers : Theoretical considerations concerning quantized magnetic flux in superconducting cylinders , Physical Review Letters, Volume 7, 1961, p. 46
  • Some exact results of the many body problem in one dimension with repulsive delta function interaction , Physical Review Letters, Volume 19, 1967, p. 1312 (Yang-Baxter relations)
  • with Tai Tsun Wu : Concept of non integrable phase factors and global formulation of gauge fields , Physical Review D, Volume 12, 1975, p. 3845
  • Magnetic monopoles, fiber bundles and gauge theories , Annals New York Academy of Sciences, Volume 294, 1977, pp. 86-97
  • Interview with Zhang in Mathematical Intelligencer 1993, Vol. 15, No. 4
  • Einstein's impact on theoretical physics , Physics Today, June 1980

literature

  • CS Liu, S.-T. Yau (Editor): Chen Ning Yang. A great physicist of the twentieth century , International Press, Boston 1995
  • A. Goldhaber, R. Shrock, J. Smith, P. van Nieuwenhuizen, G. Sterman, W. Weisberger (editors): Symmetry and Modern Physics (Yang Retirement Symposium, Stony Brook 1999), World Scientific 2003
  • ML Geh, CH Oh, KK Phua (Editor): Statistical Physics, High Energy, Condensed Matter and Mathematical Physics. Proceedings of the conference in honor of CN Yang's 85th birthday (Singapore 2007), World Scientific 2008
  • Yang Chen Ning , in: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 38/1987 of September 7, 1987, in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely available)

Awards (selection)

Web links

Commons : Chen Ning Yang  - Collection of Images

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Bing-An Li, Yuefan Deng: Biography of CN Yang ( en ) Retrieved September 11, 2007: “In his 1945 passport, his date of birth was incorrectly stated as September 22, 1922. Since then he has used this date in all of the following official documents. "
  2. ↑ Award-winning scientists give up US nationality to become Chinese citizens, state media reports. February 21, 2017, accessed February 28, 2017 .
  3. ↑ 杨振宁 获得 外国人 在 华 永久 居留 证 ( zh-cn ) 人民網 . November 5, 2004. Retrieved February 21, 2017.
  4. ^ Chinese "Green Card" . China Central Television. June 24, 2005. Retrieved June 1, 2013.
  5. ^ Quarterly Publication of Individuals, Who Have Chosen To Expatriate, as Required by Section 6039G . In: Federal Register . Retrieved February 22, 2017.
  6. ↑ 杨振宁 、 姚 期 智 正式 转为 中国科学院 院士 (zh) . February 21, 2017. 
  7. ↑ Zhihao Zhang: Nobel laureate, Turing Award winner become Chinese citizens, join CAS . In: China Daily , February 21, 2017. 
personal data
SURNAME Yang, Chen Ning
ALTERNATIVE NAMES 楊振寧 (Chinese - traditional character); 杨振宁 (Chinese - symbol); Yang, Frank; Yang, Franklin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Chinese-American physicist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics
DATE OF BIRTH October 1, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH Hefei , Republic of China