John Strathdee

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John Strathdee (* 1936 in San Francisco ) is an American theoretical physicist ( elementary particle physics , quantum field theory ).

John Strathdee earned his bachelor's degree from McGill University in 1956 and then spent a year at Cambridge University , where he attended lectures by the later Nobel Prize winner in physics, Abdus Salam . From 1957 to 1959 he was at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies . After military service, he went to the Imperial College London in 1961 to study with Abdus Salam, where he did his doctorate and followed him to Trieste in 1964.

From 1965 to 1993 he worked closely with Salam in Trieste at the International Center for Theoretical Physics (ICTP). The typical collaboration was that Salam, overflowing with ideas, presented his new ideas on one of his short visits to Trieste Strathdee and he examined them more closely in the following weeks, separated the wheat from the chaff and worked on them further. Another close associate of Salam in Trieste was Robert Delbourgo , who, like Strathdee, had the ability to accurately carry out lengthy calculations. Added to this was Strathdee's outstanding mathematical skills and his knowledge of various areas of theoretical physics.

The superfield formalism for supersymmetric field theories originates from Salam and Strathdee , which is formulated in superspaces with Grassmann coordinates in addition to the usual space-time coordinates. The superfield formalism turned out to be a major improvement and simplification in the treatment of supersymmetric theories. Salam and Strathdee also showed how to get irreducible representations of super algebras. Further work with Salam concerns nonlinear representations of the Poincaré group and conformal group in the context of investigations into quantum gravity, the possibility of combining spin and SU (3) symmetry to SU (6) and solution methods for field theories with non-polynomial interaction. Salam and Strathdee made important contributions to the Kaluza-Klein compactification, for example of the 11 dimensions from N = 8 supergravity to 4 space-time dimensions. In a special case, in which two of six dimensions are initially compacted on a 2-sphere, both showed that the resulting four-dimensional theory had SU (2) x U (1) symmetry with chiral fermions. This was important at the time because it showed a mechanism for generating chiral fermions from higher dimensional non-chiral theories (in the Standard Model the fermions are chiral). Soon afterwards they showed this for eight dimensions to be compactified. Strathdee and Salam also worked together on (super) string theories and Chern-Simons theories on theories for high-temperature superconductors .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Entry on Dublin IAS
  2. ^ Gordon Fraser: Cosmic Anger: Abdus Salam, Oxford UP 2008
  3. ^ Kibble, Obituary for Abdus Salam, Biogr. Memoirs of the Royal Society, 1998
  4. ↑ Salam, Strathdee, Supergauge Transformations, Nucl. Phys. B, Vol. 76, 1974, pp. 477-482
  5. ↑ Salam, Strathdee, Superfields and Fermi-Bose symmetry, Phys. Rev. D, Vol. 11, 1974, pp. 1521-1535
  6. ^ Salam, Strathdee, Feynman rules for superfields, Nucl. Phys. B, Volume 86, 1975, pp. 142-152
  7. ^ Salam, Strathdee, Unitary representations of super-gauge symmetries, Nucl. Phys. B, Volume 80, 1974, pp. 499-505
  8. ^ Salam Strathdee Nonlinear Realizations I. The Role of Goldstone Bosons , Phys. Review, Vol. 184, 1969, pp. 1750-1759.
  9. ↑ Isham, Salam, Strathdee, Spontaneous breakdown of conformal symmetry, Phys. Lett. B, Volume 31, 1970, p. 300
  10. ^ Salam, Delbourgo, Strathdee, Relativistic structure of SU (6), Phys. Rev., Volume 138, 1965, pp. B 420-B423
  11. ^ Salam, Strathdee Momentum-Space Behavior of Integrals in Nonpolynomial Lagrangian Theories , Physical Review D, Volume 1, 1970, pp. 1212, 3296-3312
  12. ^ Salam, Strathdee, On Kaluza-Klein theory, Annals of Physics, Volume 141, 1982, pp. 316-352
  13. ↑ Salam, Strathdee, S. Randjbar-Daemi, Spontaneous compactification in six-dimensional Einstein-Maxwell theory, Nucl. Phys. B, Vol. 214, 1983, pp. 491-512
  14. ↑ Salam, Strathdee, Randjbar-Daemi, Instanton-induced compactification and fermion chirality, Phys. Lett. B, Volume 132, 1983, pp. 56-60
  15. ↑ For example Salam, Strathdee, Randjbar-Daemi, -models and strings, Int. J. Modern Phys. A, Vol. 2, 1983, pp. 667-693
  16. ↑ Salam, Randjbar-Daemi, Strathdee, Chern-Simons superconductivity at finite temperature, Nucl. Phys. B, Volume 340, 1990, pp. 403-447
personal data
SURNAME Strathdee, John
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH 1936
PLACE OF BIRTH San Francisco