David Politzer

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Hugh David Politzer (born August 31, 1949 in New York ) is an American physicist and recipient of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics .

Politzer went to the Bronx High School of Science , which he left in 1966 to study at the University of Michigan . There he made a bachelor's degree in 1969 and received his doctorate in 1974 with Sidney Coleman at Harvard University . He then went to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena , where he is currently Professor of Theoretical Physics.

In his first published work, which appeared in 1973, Politzer described the phenomenon of asymptotic freedom , which states that the closer they are to each other, the weaker the strong interaction between quarks . If two quarks are extremely close together, the interaction is so weak that they behave almost like free particles. This theory (which was formulated independently by Frank Wilczek and his doctoral supervisor David Gross ) was an important step in the development of quantum chromodynamics . In 1974 he and Thomas Appelquist predicted the existence of Charmonium .

In 2004, together with Gross and Wilczek, Politzer received the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of strong interaction . In 2003 he received the High Energy and Particle Physics Prize from the EPS. He has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2011 .

Politzer appeared in a supporting role as the physicist Robert Serber in the film Fat Man and Little Boy (with Paul Newman ), which has the Manhattan Project and the development of the atomic bomb on.

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