Kenneth Wilson

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Kenneth Geddes Wilson (born June 8, 1936 in Waltham , Massachusetts , † June 15, 2013 in Saco , Maine ) was an American physicist and Nobel Prize winner .

Life

Wilson, a son of Edgar Bright Wilson , studied as a Putnam Fellow at Harvard University and received his doctorate from Caltech in 1961 with Murray Gell-Mann . He then worked at CERN as a postdoc at Harvard . In 1963 he became Sloan Research Fellow and Assistant Professor at Cornell University in New York and in 1970 full professor. In 1985 he became head of one of the US National Supercomputing Centers in Cornell. From 1988 to 2008 he worked at Ohio State University .

Wilson received the 1982 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his theory of critical phenomena in phase changes " (the official laudation also recognizes the important contributions of Ben Widom , Valeri Pokrowski , Leo Kadanoff and Michael Fisher to this research area). Wilson made significant contributions to the development of the theory of the renormalization group , which he applied in both statistical mechanics and quantum field theory. Through his lattice formulation of quantum chromodynamics , he founded the lattice theory . The Wilson loop (also called Wilson line), which is used in lattice gauge theories as a kind of test observable (order parameter) with the path integral of the gauge vector field over closed paths (loops) as a phase factor, is named after him. Within the lattice theory, Wilson is also the namesake for the Wilson fermions and the Wilson effect that he introduced. The method of operator product expansion ( operator product expansion ) in quantum field theory has been developed by him. He has not only worked in different areas, but also used seemingly abstract methods constructively for concrete problems, e.g. B. the method of renormalization to solve the Kondo problem , whereby he was very open to numerical methods from an early stage.

In 1973 he received the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics , and in 1975 the Boltzmann Medal . In 1980 he received the Wolf Prize for Physics together with Michael Fisher and Leo Kadanoff . In 1982 the Nobel Prize in Physics finally followed. In 1993 he received the first Aneesur Rahman Prize . Since 1975 he was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences , since 1984 of the American Philosophical Society . In 1998 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society .

His PhD students include Roman Jackiw and Michael Peskin .

Wilson was married.

Fonts

  • Problems in physics with many scales of length . In: Scientific American . August 1979, German The renormalization group . In: Spectrum of Science . October 1979.
  • The Renormalization group (RG) and critical phenomena 1 . In: Physical Review B . Volume 4, 1971, p. 3174.
  • The renormalization group: critical phenomena and the Kondo problem . In: Reviews of modern physics . Volume 47, 1975, pp. 773-839.
  • with M. Fisher: Critical exponents in 3.99 dimensions . In: Physical Review Letters . Volume 28, 1972, p. 240.
  • Non-lagrangian models in current algebra . In: Physical Review . Volume 179, 1969, pp. 1499-1512 (operator product expansion).
  • Model of coupling constant renormalization . In: Physical Review D . Volume 2, 1970, pp. 1438-1472.
  • Operator product expansions and anomalous dimensions in Thirring model . In: Physical Review D . Volume 2, 1970, pp. 1473-1477.
  • Anomalous dimensions and breakdown of scale invariance in perturbation theory . In: Physical Review D . Volume 2, 1970, pp. 1478-1493.
  • RG and strong interactions . In: Physical Review D . Volume 3, 1971, pp. 1818-1846.
  • Confinement of quarks . In: Physical Review D . Volume 10, 1974, pp. 2445-2459.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Wilson, Kenneth Geddes - Author profile . INSPIRE-HEP . Retrieved July 29, 2019.
  2. ^ Wilson Confinement of Quarks , Physical Review D 10, 1974, p. 4445, abstract