Keith Brueckner

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Keith Allan Brueckner (born March 19, 1924 in Minneapolis , Minnesota , † September 19, 2014 ) was an American theoretical physicist who mainly dealt with nuclear physics and laser fusion .

Live and act

Brueckner's paternal grandfather was a Lutheran pastor from Bavaria who emigrated to the USA, his father was a professor of education in Minneapolis. Brueckner first wanted to be a chemical engineer and then studied mathematics at the University of Minnesota , where he received his master's degree in 1947 and in 1950 after an interruption in World War II when he worked in weather forecasting and completed undergraduate courses from 1943 on University of California, Berkeley in theoretical physics doctorate ( "Production of mesons by photons and nucleons").

In Berkeley after the war he worked as a research assistant in the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory with Ernest Lawrence , Robert Serber (his doctoral advisor), Emilio Segrè , Edwin McMillan , Wolfgang Panofsky and Luis Walter Alvarez, among others . In 1950/51 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton . 1951 to 1955 he was assistant professor at Indiana University in Bloomington and from 1956 to 1959 as professor of physics at the University of Pennsylvania and at the same time from 1953 consultant at the "Weapons Laboratory" of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and at the Brookhaven National Laboratory .

At the newly founded University of California, San Diego (UCSD) he was professor from 1959 and first chairman of the physics department until 1961 (recruited by Roger Revelle ), from 1960 also " Dean of Arts and Sciences". Among other things, he brought the Nobel Prize winners Walter Kohn and Maria Goeppert-Mayer to the UCSD. 1965-1970 he was the founding director of the Institute of Radiation Physics and aerodynamics (Institute for Radiation Physics and Aerodynamics), later "Institute for Pure and Applied Physical Sciences," and remained so until his retirement .

Brueckner also had high advisory functions in US industry and administration, for example he was an advisor to the Atomic Energy Commission , the " Institute for Defense Analyzes " (IDA), of which he was Vice President and "Director of Research" in 1961/2 NASA , the US Air Force and had its own consulting office ("Keith A. Brueckner and Associates") from 1974 to 1978, after having worked for KMS (Keeve M. Siegel) from 1968. In addition, around 1959 he was one of the founding members of the JASON Defense Advisory Group , which was initially affiliated with IDA, but left it around 1965.

Brueckner was a member of the US National Academy of Sciences (1969) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1968). In 1963 he received the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics .

In the 1950s, Brueckner worked, among other things, on theoretical models to describe the generation of mesons in nucleon-nucleon collisions, which was experimentally investigated at cyclotron accelerators in Berkeley. After that he was a leader in nuclear physics many-particle theory , where he found the methods of summing interaction diagrams in "nuclear matter" in a self-consistent way to form a kind of potential ("Brückner G-matrix", "Brueckner theory" of nuclear matter). The theoretical problem with nuclear forces that was difficult to deal with was that they had an attractive “tail”, but at the same time a “hard” repulsive “core” (hard core). Brückner also applied the theory to other quantum liquids such as liquid helium . His theory was taken up and expanded by Hans Bethe and others.

An important contribution to the quantum mechanical many-body theory was his derivation of the random phase approximation for dense electron gases with Murray Gell-Mann in 1957.

As early as the 1950s he was also working on secret projects for the US Department of Defense , for example with John von Neumann and Murray Gell-Mann on military radar observation and from 1955 in Los Alamos with Kenneth Watson on what was then still secret fusion research . Early on in the 1960s he also thought about defending against ICBMs with lasers and about laser fusion - in 1974 he was a co-author of a large overview article on laser fusion and he was a co-founder of the company KMS Fusion.

Fonts (selection)

  • Brueckner: Many-body problems for strongly interacting particles. II. Linked cluster expansion. In: Physical Review. Volume 100, 1955, p. 36
  • Brueckner, Gammel: Properties of nuclear matter. In: Physical Review. Volume 109, 1958, p. 1023
  • Brueckner, Gammel: Properties of liquid He3 at low temperature. In: Physical Review. Volume 109, 1958, p. 1040
  • Brueckner, M. Gell-Mann: Correlation Energy of an Electron Gas at High Density. In: Physical Review. Volume 106, 1957, p. 364, abstract
  • Brueckner, Levinson, Mahmoud: Two-body forces and nuclear saturation. I. Central forces. In: Physical Review. Volume 95, 1954, p. 217
  • Brueckner, Levinson: Approximate reduction of the many body problem for strongly interacting particles to a problem of self consistent fields. In: Physical Review. Volume 97, 1955, p. 1306
  • Brueckner: Two body forces and nuclear saturation. III: details of the structure of the nucleus. In: Physical Review. Volume 97, 1955, p. 1353
  • Brueckner, Wada: Nuclear saturation and 2 body forces: self consistent solutions and the effect of the exclusion principle. In: Physical Review. Volume 103, 1956, pp. 1008-1016
  • Brueckner, S. Jorna: Laser driven fusion. In: Reviews of Modern Physics. Volume 46, 1974, pp. 325-367

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ Partly in Production of Pi Mesons in Nucleon-Nucleon Collisions. In: Physical Review. Volume 82, 1951, p. 598
  2. ↑ that is the simplified model of meson exchange of interacting nucleons in infinitely extended atomic nuclei
personal data
SURNAME Brueckner, Keith
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Brueckner, Keith Allan (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American theoretical physicist
DATE OF BIRTH March 19, 1924
PLACE OF BIRTH Minneapolis , Minnesota
DATE OF DEATH 19th September 2014