Johann Rafelski

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Johann Rafelski, 2019

Johann Rafelski (born May 19, 1950 in Krakow ) is a German-American theoretical physicist .

Life

Rafelski was born in Krakow, from where the family moved to Frankfurt am Main in 1964. After graduating from the Goethe-Gymnasium Frankfurt, Rafelski studied physics at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main from 1968 to 1971 . He then worked as a research assistant at Walter Greiner in Frankfurt, where he received his doctorate in 1973 (on quantum electrodynamics in strong fields and the positron generation that occurs in the process). From 1973 he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Philadelphia (with Abraham Klein ), at the Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago (with Michael Danos from NIST and John W. Clark ), at the heavy ion accelerator of the GSI Darmstadt (1977) and in 1977 at CERN in Geneva (with John Stewart Bell and Rolf Hagedorn ).

From 1979 to 1983 Rafelski was Professor of Theoretical Physics at Goethe University, where he worked closely with Hagedorn and Berndt Mueller . One of his students there was the later professor in Dresden, Gerhard Soff . He then held a chair for theoretical physics at the University of Cape Town until 1987 , where he established the institute for theoretical physics and astrophysics. From 1987 he became professor of physics at the University of Arizona and at the Arizona Research Laboratory. He was a visiting scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Washington DC, at the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich (1992), at the GSI in Darmstadt and was visiting professor at the University of Paris VII . (1993/1994 and 2004/2005), where he worked with Jean Letessier (on quark-gluon plasmas ). He was also a consultant at GSI and the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LAMPF, the "meson factory" in Los Alamos) and is a regular visiting scientist at CERN.

He was married to Helga Betz since 1973, who died in 2000 and with whom he has two children. He has been married to Victoria Grossack since 2003.

plant

Among other things, Rafelski dealt with the formation of the quark-gluon plasma in heavy ion collisions (deconfinement and signs of this from the formation of particles with a strangeness quantum number, formation of hadrons, hadronization from the plasma as a model for similar processes in the early universe), quantum electrodynamics of strong fields (e.g. with ultrashort laser pulses) and the theory of muon catalysis of fusion reactions. He worked with Steven Jones in Los Alamos on such table top fusion experiments (compared to the large-scale research experiments on tokamaks) . Rafelski also dealt with artificial intelligence (neural networks).

Fonts

QED strong fields, vacuum structure QFT
  • with G. Mourou, T. Tajima: The light-pulse horizon , CERN Courier, February 2009.
  • with Berndt Müller : The structure of the vacuum. A dialogue about nothing. German, Thun 1985, ISBN 3-87144-888-5 , English translation, PDF file .
  • with Walter Greiner and Berndt Müller: Quantum electrodynamics of strong fields. Springer, Berlin 1985, ISBN 3-540-13404-2 .
  • with Abraham Klein, Lewis P. Fulcher Decay of the Vacuum , Scientific American, Vol. 341, June 1979.
  • with Abraham Klein , Lewis P. Fulcher Fermions and Bosons interaction with arbitrarily strong external fields , Physics Reports, Vol. 38, 1978, pp. 227-361.
  • with Berndt Müller, Walter Greiner The Charged Vacuum in overcritical fields , Nuclear Physics B, Vol. 68, 1974, pp. 585-604.
  • Self-consistent many-body equations for electrons and muons and their effects in muonic atoms. Dissertation. University of Frankfurt am Main 1973.
  • with Lewis P. Fulcher, Walter Greiner Superheavy elements and an upper limit to the electric field strength , Physical Review Letters, Vol. 27, pp. 958-961, 1971. doi : 10.1103 / PhysRevLett.27.958
Quark Gluon Plasma, heavy ion collisions
  • Melting Hadrons, Boiling Quarks-From Hagedorn Temperature to Ultra-Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions at CERN. , Springer, 2016, ISBN 978-3-319-17545-4 .
  • with Torleif Ericson: The tale of the Hagedorn temperature , CERN Courier, September 2003.
  • with J. Kapusta, B. Müller (editors and authors): Quark-Gluon Plasma. Theoretical Foundations. Elsevier 2003.
  • with Hans-Thomas Elze, E. Ferreira, T. Kodama, RL Thews (editors and authors): New States of Matter in Hadronic Interactions , AIP Conference Proceedings, Vol. 631, 2002.
  • with Jean Letessier: Hadrons and Quark-Gluon Plasmas. Cambridge University Press 2002, ISBN 9780521385367
  • with Emanuele Quercigh: A strange quark plasma , Physics World, Vol. 13, October 2000, p. 37
  • Editor and co-author: Strangeness in hadronic matter , AIP Conf. Proc., Vol. 340, 1995.
  • with Jean Letessier, Hans Gutbrod (eds.): Hot hadronic matter: theory and experiment. In honor of R. Hagedorn's 75th Birthday Plenum Press, NATO Science Series B, Vol. 346, 1995.
  • with Hans Gutbrod (Ed.): Particle Production in highly excited matter. Plenum Press, NATO Science Series B, Vol. 303, 1993.
  • with Peter Koch, Berndt Müller: Strangeness in Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions , Physics Reports, Vol. 142, 1986, pp. 167-262.
  • with Michael Danos: Perspectives in high energy nuclear collisions. NBS, Washington, GSI, Darmstadt 1983.
  • Formation and Observables of the Quark-Gluon Plasma , Physics Reports, Vol. 88, 1982, pp. 331-346.
Muon-catalyzed fusion
  • with Steven Jones, Hendrik Monkhorst (eds.): Muon Catalyzed Fusion Meeting. Sanibel Island, Florida 1988. American Institute of Physics 1989.
  • with Steven Jones Cold nuclear Fusion , Scientific American, Vol. 257, Jul. 1987, p. 84
Special theory of relativity
  • Relativity Matters: From Einstein's EMC2 to Laser Particle Acceleration and Quark-Gluon Plasma. , Springer, 2017, ISBN 978-3-319-51230-3 .
  • with Walter Greiner: Special Theory of Relativity. German, Thun 1984, ISBN 3-87144-711-0 .
Others
  • with John W. Clark, JV Winston: Brain without mind: Computer simulation of neural networks with modifiable neuronal interactions , Physics Reports, Vol. 123, 1985, pp. 215-273.
  • with Michael Danos: Pocketbook of mathematical functions. German, Thun 1984.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Rafelski, Johann - Author profile . INSPIRE-HEP . Retrieved July 22, 2019.
  2. ↑ Rafelski, Berndt Mueller Strangeness production in the quark gluon plasma , Physical Review Letters, Vol. 48, 1982, p. 1066, Erratum Vol. 56, 1986, p. 2334
personal data
SURNAME Rafelski, Johann
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German physicist and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH May 19, 1950
PLACE OF BIRTH Krakow