Kenneth A. Johnson

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Kenneth Alan Johnson (born March 26, 1931 in Duluth , Minnesota , † February 9, 1999 in Boston , Massachusetts ) was an American theoretical physicist.

Life

Johnson studied physics at the Illinois Institute of Technology (bachelor's degree in 1952) and at the Harvard University , where he earned his master's degree in 1952 and 1955, when Julian Schwinger doctorate . He was then a research fellow and lecturer at Harvard. After a stay as a Fellow of the National Science Foundation at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen , he was an Assistant Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1958 , where he became a full professor in 1965 and remained until his death.

Johnson made important contributions to quantum field theory . He was one of the first to discover chiral and other anomalies in the 1960s, and in the 1970s he was involved in the development of the MIT Bag model , the then standard model for describing hadrons in quantum chromodynamics .

He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , the American Association for the Advancement of Science , Fellow of the American Physical Society, and Sloan Research Fellow .

Fonts

  • The bag model of quark confinement . In: Scientific American July 1979
  • The physics of asymptotic freedom . In: Alan Guth , Kerson Huang , Robert L. Jaffe (Eds.): Asymptotic realms of physics . MIT Press, 1983 (commemorative publication for Francis Low )
  • with Roman Jackiw : Dynamical model of spontaneous symmetry breaking . In: Physical Review D , Vol. 8, 1973, p. 2386
  • with Alan Chodos , Robert L. Jaffe, Charles B. Thorn , Victor Weisskopf : New extended model of hadrons . In: Physical Review D , Vol. 9, 1974, pp. 3471-96 (MIT bag model)
  • with Alan Chodos , Robert L. Jaffe, Charles B. Thorn , Victor Weisskopf : Baryon structure in the bag theory . In: Physical Review D , Vol. 10, 1974, p. 2599

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Schwinger found evidence of the chiral anomaly as early as 1951. Johnson showed in 1963 (Physics Letters vol. 5, p. 263) that in two-dimensional QED with massless particles, the axial current (chiral symmetry) and the gauge symmetry cannot be maintained at the same time. The chiral anomaly was then rediscovered by Stephen Adler on the one hand (published in 1969) and John Stewart Bell and Roman Jackiw on the other hand (1967) to explain the decay of the neutral pion into two photons. See for the story z. B. Reinhold Bertlmann Anomalies in Quantum Field Theory , Clarendon Press 1996, p. 2
personal data
SURNAME Johnson, Kenneth A.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Johnson, Kenneth Alan (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American theoretical physicist
DATE OF BIRTH March 26, 1931
PLACE OF BIRTH Duluth , Minnesota
DATE OF DEATH February 9, 1999
Place of death Boston , Massachusetts