Julius Wess

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Julius Wess (2006)

Julius Wess (born December 5, 1934 in Oberwölz in Styria , † August 8, 2007 in Hamburg ) was an Austrian physicist.

Life

Wess received his doctorate in theoretical physics from the University of Vienna in 1957 as a student of Hans Thirring . As a post-doctoral student he was at CERN , New York University and the University of Washington in Seattle and completed his habilitation in Vienna in 1965. In 1966 he became an Associate Professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University . In 1968 he was appointed full professor and director of the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Karlsruhe . After several rejected appointments, he finally moved to the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich in 1990 and was also appointed director at the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich.

He was visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study ( Einstein Professor 1980), the University of Vienna ( Schrödinger Professor 1985) and the University of California, Berkeley ( Miller Professor 1986).

From 1993 to 1996, Wess headed the Scientific Council of the German Electron Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg. He also participated intensively in the development of new scientific structures in physics in the new federal states after the fall of the Wall and in the former Yugoslavia.

After his retirement in 2002, he was most recently a guest at DESY, where he also devoted himself to teaching, in particular on supersymmetry and supergravity , at the University of Hamburg . Wess was buried in the Ohlsdorf cemetery in Hamburg.

Services

Wess gained worldwide recognition among colleagues in the field of mathematical physics , in particular elementary particle physics , supersymmetry and supergravity. In the 1960s he was one of the first to apply the SU (3) group (used around the same time for the quark concept by Murray Gell-Mann and others ) in elementary particle physics. He also examined two-dimensional quantum field theories and conformal symmetry and, with Bruno Zumino, from 1967 onwards, nonlinear representations of chiral symmetry (Wess-Zumino term, chiral anomaly).

In 1973, together with Bruno Zumino at the University of Karlsruhe, he discovered the first quantum field theory with supersymmetry in four space-time coordinates, which was later named after him as the Wess-Zumino model and can certainly be seen as an "invention" of supersymmetry . Regardless of this, supersymmetry was also "discovered" somewhat earlier by Russian scientists, but this was ignored in the West, and also by some early string theorists .

Later he dealt with non-commutative spaces as the basis of quantum field theories.

Fonts

  • with Jonathan Bagger: Supersymmetry and Supergravity. Princeton Series in Physics, 1983, Revised Edition, 1992, ISBN 0-691-02530-4 .
  • with Bruno Zumino: Supergauge transformations in four dimensions. In: Nuclear Physics B, Volume 70, 1974, pp. 39-50.

Awards

Memberships

Julius Wess Prize

The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology has been awarding the Julius Wess Prize in honor of Wess since 2008. Prize winners are:

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Julius Wess Prize