José Leite Lopes

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José Leite Lopes (born October 28, 1918 in Recife , † June 12, 2006 in Rio de Janeiro ) was a Brazilian theoretical physicist who dealt with quantum field theory and elementary particle physics .

Live and act

Lopes first studied technical chemistry in Pernambuco , but after meeting Mário Schenberg in 1937 he switched to physics at the University of Sao Paulo and from 1940 to the University of Rio de Janeiro , graduating in 1942. In 1944 he went to Princeton University , where he 1946 received his doctorate from Wolfgang Pauli . He became a professor of theoretical physics in Rio. In 1949 he founded the Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas (CBPF) in Rio with César Lattes . In the same year he visited the Institute for Advanced Study at the invitation of Robert Oppenheimer and in 1957 he was a visiting scientist with Richard Feynman at Caltech .

1960 to 1963 he organized the Latin American School of Physics in Rio, where, among others, Feynman and Chen Ning Yang gave lectures. 1962 to 1964 he organized the Physics Institute of the newly founded University of Brasília . After the military coup in Brazil in 1964, he went to the University of Paris-South in Orsay with Maurice Lévy . In 1968 he returned to Rio and was director of the university's institute for physics, but was removed from office by the military government in 1969 and went to the USA (visiting professor at the University of Pittsburgh 1969/70) and then to France, where he worked from 1970 to 1985 Professor at the University of Strasbourg (until 1974 initially as a visiting professor) and researched for the CNRS . In 1986 he returned to Brazil as director of the CBPF (after having been there briefly in 1981).

At the end of the 1950s he was one of those who attempted to unite electromagnetic and weak interaction (in this context he also predicted a heavy vector boson as an exchange particle of the weak interaction, with 40-60 times the mass of the proton). He was ahead of his time (the Unified Theory of Electroweak Interaction was developed by Sheldon Lee Glashow , Abdus Salam and Steven Weinberg in the 1960s). In addition to high energy physics , he also dealt with nuclear physics .

From 1967 to 1971 he was President of the Sociedade Brasileira de Física (Brazilian Physical Society).

He published 22 books, some of a popular scientific nature. In Strasbourg he was the founder of the magazine Cahiers Fundamenta Scientiae .

Honors

Fonts

  • Idéias e Paixoes (ideas and passions). CBPF 1999,

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ JL Lopes: A model of the universal Fermi interaction . In: Nuclear Physics , Vol. 8 (1958), pp. 234-236, ISSN  0375-9474
  2. ↑ ISSN  0290-0270
personal data
SURNAME Lopes, José Leite
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Brazilian theoretical physicist
DATE OF BIRTH October 28, 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH Recife
DATE OF DEATH June 12, 2006
Place of death Rio de Janeiro