Lincoln Wolfenstein

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Lincoln Wolfenstein (born February 10, 1923 in Cleveland , Ohio , † March 27, 2015 in Oakland , California ) was an American theoretical physicist who studied the theory of the weak interaction .

Life

Wolfenstein studied at the University of Chicago (bachelor's degree in 1943, master's degree in 1944) and received his doctorate there in 1949 under Edward Teller (“Theory of proposed reactions involving polarized protons”). In between he was on the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics from 1944 to 1946. Then he was from 1948 (then as an instructor) at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh (that is, until 1967 he was at its predecessor, the Carnegie Institute of Technology), where he was professor of physics and retired in 2000 . In 1955 he was visiting professor at Berkeley University . In 1965/65 he was a Fellow of the National Science Foundation at CERN . In 1988 he was Fairchild Visiting Scholar at Caltech and 1970/71 visiting professor at the University of Michigan .

His doctorate and his first work were on spin-polarized proton-proton scattering (he studied triple scattering in more detail according to the steps polarization-interaction-observation). Wolfenstein is best known for his work on weak interaction. In 1964, after discovering the CP violation, he suggested that it could be caused by a new super-weak force (superweak interaction). Today, however, it is traced back to a phase in the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix (the mass and mixing matrix of quarks ) for which Wolfenstein gave a new Wolfenstein parameterization named after him in 1983 . A further field of Wolfenstein are neutrinos , where he is the best known for its participation (1978) on the answer to the riddle solar neutrinos through the so-called MSW effect is known, named after him and the Russian physicists Stanislav Mikheyev and Alexei Smirnov to 1985.

In 1992 he received the Sakurai Prize . In 2005 he received the Bruno Pontecorvo Prize for his participation in the MIW effect. He had been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1978 .

Fonts

  • Wolfenstein (Ed.): CP-Violation. North Holland 1989 (Reprint Band)
  • CP Violation . TASI Lectures 2000, arxiv : hep-ph / 0011400
  • Neutrino Physics. Reviews of Modern Physics, Centennial Issue, Volume 71, 1999
  • with Joao Silva Exploring fundamental particles , CRC Press / Taylor and Francis 2011

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Obituary: Lincoln Wolfenstein post-gazette.com, accessed May 8, 2015
  2. ↑ Wolfenstein's work Neutrino Oscillations in Matter appeared in Physical Review D. Volume 17, 1978, p. 2369
personal data
SURNAME Wolfenstein, Lincoln
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American theoretical physicist
DATE OF BIRTH February 10, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH Cleveland , Ohio
DATE OF DEATH March 27, 2015
Place of death Oakland , California