Leonard Susskind

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Leonard Susskind at Stanford University (2013)

Leonard Susskind (* 1940 in New York City ) is an American theoretical physicist and co-founder of string theory .

Life

Susskind received his bachelor's degree from City College of New York in 1962 and his PhD in 1965 with Peter Carruthers at Cornell University , where he also worked as a post-doctoral student . He was then Assistant Professor (1966), Associate Professor (1968) and from 1970 Professor of Physics at the Belfer Graduate School of Science, Yeshiva University , 1971/1972 Professor at Tel Aviv University and since 1979 he has been Professor at Stanford University , since 2000 as Felix Bloch Professor for Physics. In addition, he was Distinguished Professor at the Korea Institute for Advanced Study from 1999 to 2015 . Since 2007 he has also been a member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario , Canada.

Susskind was married twice and has four children.

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In 1968 Susskind was one of the developers of the light front formalism (light cone frame) in quantum field theory (QFT). He was one of the pioneers of string theory as early as 1969: with Yoichiro Nambu and Holger Bech Nielsen , he was one of the first to propose strings as an interpretation of Gabriele Veneziano's dual resonance model . From 1974 he was also one of the pioneers of the lattice theory , which he also applied to investigate the confinement mechanism. He was also in 1995 next to Gerardus' t Hooft (1993) one of the originators of the holographic principle in the QFT, first postulated as a method that unitarity (necessary for the preservation of the probability interpretation) of quantum mechanics in the presence of black holes (maintain as Black Hole Information paradox known). Furthermore, this principle provides an interpretation of the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of black holes. According to Susskind and 't Hooft, the description of physics by an observer falling into the black hole and an observer sitting at the event horizon of the black hole are equivalent. You see the "information" of the matter falling into the hole encoded on the event horizon surface. Therefore the entropy of the hole is proportional to the surface area. The information is later released as Hawking radiation when the black hole is destroyed - contrary to Stephen Hawking's earlier assumptions - without loss. Susskind and 't Hooft postulated that this equivalence expresses a new physical principle, the “complementarity principle of black holes”, which is intended to replace the locality principle of quantum field theories in quantum gravity . Also in 1993, Susskind applied string theory to explain the entropy of black holes.

In 2012, Susskind supported the fire wall hypothesis by Joseph Polchinski and colleagues. However, the formation of a firewall according to Susskind, in contrast to Polchinski, would take place much later, if at Page time (at which half of the entropy of the black hole was transferred into Hawking radiation) the transfer of quantum entanglement from the surrounding area took place the event horizon has exhausted. The firewall singularity then migrates to the event horizon. Since the horizon coincides with the wall of fire, according to Susskind his hypothesis of the complementarity of black holes would not be applicable.

With Juan Maldacena , he made the ER-EPR conjecture in 2013. This postulates a connection of entangled quantum particles, the EPR pairs, through special wormholes, also called Einstein-Rosen bridges . The conjecture is a suggestion to resolve the information paradox of black holes that was exacerbated by Joseph Polchinski's Feuerwall paradox and, according to the authors, is also a new approach to quantum gravity. After Ping Gao, Daniel Louis Jafferis and Aron C. Wall proposed traversable wormholes and their equivalent description as quantum teleportation in 2016 , this also led to a new approach to the information paradox of black holes as a variant of Susskind's old hypothesis of black hole complementarity .

In addition, he is one of the inventors of the only outlined M-theory , which generalizes the string theory, and which Susskind and colleagues gave the form of a matrix field theory. His most recent work (2003) includes the transfer of the anthropic principle to string theory.

Independently of the work of Andrei Sakharov , then unknown in the West , Susskind similarly developed a theory of baryogenesis in the early universe. In 1979, along with Steven Weinberg , he was one of the first to propose the mass production of elementary particles based on dynamic symmetry breaking in Technicolor theories.

He received the Pregel Award from the New York Academy of Sciences (1975), was Loeb Lecturer at Harvard University (1976) and won the Sakurai Prize in Theoretical Particle Physics (1997). In 2008 he received the Pomeranschuk Prize , in 2018 the Oskar Klein Medal . In 1998 he received the Science Writing Award from the American Institute of Physics for his Scientific American article "Black Holes and the Information Paradox" . He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences (2000). He is a Distinguished Professor at the Korea Institute for Advanced Study .

Fonts

  • Black Holes and the Information Paradox . Scientific American, 1997.
  • The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design . Black Bay, 2006, ISBN 978-0-316-01333-8 .
  • with James Lindesay: An Introduction to Black Holes, Information and the String Theory Revolution: The Holographic Universe . World Scientific, Singapore 2004, ISBN 978-981-256-131-2 .
  • The Black Hole War: My battle with Stephen Hawking to make the world safe for quantum mechanics . Back Bay, 2009, ISBN 978-0-316-01641-4 .
    • German edition The war over the black hole: How I struggled with Stephen Hawking to save quantum mechanics , Suhrkamp Verlag 2010, ISBN 978-3-518-42205-2 .
  • with George Hrabovsky: The Theoretical Minimum: What You Need to Know to Start Doing Physics , Basic Books 2013, ISBN 978-0-465-02811-5 .
  • with Art Friedman: Quantum Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum , Basic Books 2014, ISBN 978-0-465-03667-7 .

Web links

Commons : Leonard Susskind  - album with pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Lenny hard , 20-21. May 2000. Symposium on his 60th birthday
  2. ↑ Model of self induced strong interactions . In: Physical Review , Volume 165, 1968, p. 1535 and Hadronic Currents . ibid., p. 1547. Introduced as the Infinite Momentum Frame Method by Steven Weinberg as early as 1966, and even earlier as a quantization method in relativistic quantum mechanics by Paul Dirac .
  3. ^ John Schwarz: String Theory: The Early Years . 2000, arxiv : hep-th / 0007118 .
  4. ^ John Kogut, Leonard Susskind: Hamiltonian Formulation of Wilson's Lattice Gauge Theory . In: Physical Review D , Volume 11, 1975, pp. 395-408.
  5. ↑ L. Susskind: Lattice Models Of Quark Confinement At High Temperature . In: Physical Review D . Volume 20, 1979, p. 2610.
  6. ^ The World as a Hologram . In: Journal of Mathematical Physics. Volume 36, 1995, p. 6377, arxiv : hep-th / 9409089
  7. ↑ L. Susskind: String theory and the principle of black hole complementarity . In: Physical Reviev Letters . Volume 71, 1993, p. 2368.
  8. ↑ L. Susskind: Some Speculations about Black Hole Entropy in String Theory . RU-93-44, 1993. arxiv : hep-th / 9309145 .
  9. ^ Susskind: Singularities, Firewalls and Complementarity . 2012, arxiv : 1208.3445
  10. ^ Susskind: The Transfer of Entanglement: The Case for Firewalls . 2012, arxiv : 1210.2098
  11. ^ Maldacena, Susskind: Cool horizons for entangled black holes . 2013, arxiv : 1306.0533 .
  12. ↑ Natalile Wolchover: Newfound Wormhole Allows Information to Escape Black Holes . In: Quanta Magazine , October 23, 2017
  13. ↑ Juan Maldacena, Douglas Stanford, Zhenbin Yang: Diving into transversable wormholes . 2017, arxiv : 1704.05333 .
  14. ↑ KC Cole: Wormholes Untangle a Black Hole Paradox . In: Quanta Magazine , April 24, 2015
  15. ↑ Tom Banks , Willy Fischler , Stephen Shenker , L. Susskind: M Theory as a Matrix Model: A Conjecture . In: Physical Review D . Volume 55, 1997, pp. 5112-5128, arxiv : hep-th / 9610043 .
  16. ^ Anthropic String Theory Landscape . arxiv : hep-th / 0302219 .
  17. ^ Leonard Susskind, Savas Dimopoulos : Baryon Number of the Universe . In: Physical Review D . Volume 18, 1978, p. 4500.
  18. ↑ S. Dimopoulos, L. Susskind: Masses without Scalars . In: Nuclear Physics B . Volume 155, 1979, p. 237.
personal data
SURNAME Susskind, Leonard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist, co-founder of string theory
DATE OF BIRTH 1940
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City