Ernst Carl Gerlach Stückelberg

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ernst Carl Gerlach Stückelberg v. Breidenbach (1934)

Ernst Carl Gerlach Stückelberg v. Breidenbach (born February 1, 1905 in Basel , † September 4, 1984 in Geneva ) was a Swiss mathematician and physicist .

Live and act

He was born as the son of the lawyer Alfred Stückelberg and Alice. von Breidenbach was born in Basel and baptized Johann Melchior Ernst Karl Gerlach. He later called himself Ernst Carl Gerlach. The family name Stickelberger , which has been used since the 14th century, was changed by his grandfather Ernst Stückelberg , a well-known history painter. Since his maternal grandfather was allowed to transfer his titles to his daughter's children with imperial approval due to the lack of male descendants, Ernst Carl Gerlach Stückelberg received the new name Stückelberg from Breidenbach zu Breidenstein and Melsbach in 1911 .

Stückelberg attended the Humanist High School in Basel and studied, initially with a focus on experimental physics, with Arnold Sommerfeld in Munich , among others . He received his doctorate in 1927 at the University of Basel under August Hagenbach (1871-1949), the son of the Basel physicist Eduard Hagenbach-Bischoff . The subject of the dissertation was an experimental work on cathode rays . He then went to Princeton University to study with Karl Taylor Compton , where he already turned to theoretical physics. He became friends with Philip Morse and both were introduced to quantum mechanics by Hendrik Anthony Kramers at the Michigan Summer School in 1928 . In 1930 he became an assistant professor at Princeton and visited with Morse Sommerfeld in Munich and Cambridge. In 1931 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society . During the Depression , funding research positions in the USA became difficult, and he returned to Switzerland in 1932, where he completed his habilitation under Gregor Wentzel at the University of Zurich . In 1935 he became a professor at the University of Geneva , where he stayed until his retirement in 1975. From 1956 he was also a professor at the University of Lausanne .

In 1934 he drafted a covariant perturbative treatment of quantum field theory , which received little attention, but at least caught the attention of Wolfgang Pauli . In 1935, independently of Hideki Yukawa and presumably before that, he explained the strong interaction of nucleons through the exchange of vector bosons (he did not publish this, as Pauli declared this to be ridiculous). In 1938 he drafted a renormable theory with a massive vector boson (Stueckelberg field), underlining the necessity of maintaining a gauge symmetry. In 1941 he proposed that the positron be formally described as an electron of negative energy moving backwards in time. This interpretation, which circumvented the idea of ​​positrons as holes in a Dirac lake occupied electron states of negative energy in the vacuum, was later set up independently, and with significantly greater effect, by Richard Feynman ( Feynman-Stückelberg interpretation ). Stückelberg also used his interpretation to set up simple Feynman diagrams before Feynman, who did this only in 1947. In 1943 for the Physical Review submitted but rejected work he presented a program for the renormalization of quantum electrodynamics on. In it he anticipated much of the later works of Feynman, Tomonaga and Schwinger, which brought them the Nobel Prize.

In 1951 he and the mathematician André Petermann discovered the renormalization group (before Murray Gell-Mann and Francis Low ).

Later, Stückelberg suffered from a mental illness (which recurred again and again) and was therefore treated with electric shocks. It was z. B. reports that he talked to his dog during his lectures when he got stuck.

His doctoral students include Petermann and Constantin Piron .

Awards

  • 1962 Dr. hc from the Universities of Neuchâtel and Bern.
  • 1976 Max Planck Medal .

literature

  • Ruth Wenger: Ernst CG Stückelberg von Breidenbach. Étude biographique. University of Geneva, 1986.
  • J. Lacki (Ed.): Selected Works of Ernst CG Stueckelberg. Birkhäuser, 2008.
  • Charles Enz : Obituary in: Physics Today. Volume 39, 1986.
  • Silvan Schweber : QED and the men who made it. Princeton University Press, 1994, Chapter 10: QED in Switzerland.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Relativistically invariant perturbation theory of the Dirac electron. In: Annals of Physics. 1934, doi : 10.1002 / andp.19344130403 .
  2. ↑ Proven by Schroer, Lowenstein 1972.
  3. ↑ Stueckelberg: The interaction forces in electrodynamics and in the field theory of nuclear forces. Part II and III. In: Helvetica Physica Acta. Vol. 11, 1938, p. 299, doi : 10.5169 / seals-110855 .
  4. ↑ Stueckelberg: Un nouveau modèle de l'électron ponctuel en théorie classique. In: Helvetica Physica Acta. Vol. 14, 1941, p. 51, doi : 10.5169 / seals-111170 (French).
  5. ↑ Stueckelberg, Petermann: La normalization des constantes dans la théorie des quanta. In: Helvetica Physica Acta. Vol. 26, 1953, p. 499, doi : 10.5169 / seals-112426 (French); Preparatory work: Stueckelberg, Green: Elimination of the constantes arbitraires dans la théorie relativiste des quanta. In: Helvetica Physica Acta. Vol. 24, 1951, p. 153, doi : 10.5169 / seals-112211 (French).
personal data
SURNAME Stückelberg, Ernst Carl Gerlach
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss mathematician and physicist
DATE OF BIRTH February 1, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Basel
DATE OF DEATH 4th September 1984
Place of death Geneva