Lochlainn O'Raifeartaigh

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Lochlainn O'Raifeartaigh (born March 11, 1933 in Clontarf, Dublin , † November 18, 2000 ) was an Irish theoretical physicist.

Life

O'Raifeartaigh was the son of a senior official in the Irish Ministry of Education who was jointly responsible for expanding the universities. He studied at University College Dublin , where he was also a member of a society for the care of Gaelic (he also spoke fluent German and French). After graduating in 1956, he studied at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies with John Synge and Erwin Schrödinger . There he dealt with general relativity . In 1960 he did his doctorate with Walter Heitler at the University of Zurich ("Non Local Field Theories") and was then assistant professor at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. After meeting George Sudarshan in Bern in 1963, he was invited to lectures on group theory at the Mathematical Science Institute in Madras and then from 1964 to 1968 with Sudarshan at Syracuse University in the USA. In 1967/8 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and from 1968 Professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Dublin.

O'Raifeartaigh was known as an expert in the application of group theoretic methods in elementary particle physics, in particular for his " no-go theorem " of 1965, which forbade non-trivial connections between internal symmetries and the space-time symmetries of the Poincaré group . This theorem established its reputation because it put a stop to corresponding attempts, which were often undertaken at the time (a solution only emerged with the development of supersymmetry ). In 1975 he wrote a widely acclaimed paper on supersymmetry refraction. One possible mechanism for this is named after him. He showed that at least three chiral superfields (as the supersymmetric counterpart to Higgs fields ) were necessary for this. In the 1980s he investigated a. a. Kac-Moody and W-algebras and magnetic monopoles in non-Belian gauge theories and, in the 1990s, the Seiberg-Witten theory . He has published over 200 scientific papers with more than 60 co-authors.

He was also interested in historical aspects of science and wrote the book The Dawning of Gauge Theory about it .

In 2000 he received the Wigner Medal and in 1998 a Humboldt Research Award . He had been a member of the Royal Irish Academy of Sciences since 1962 and was a member of the Academia Europaea .

He had been married since 1958 and had five children.

Fonts

  • Group Structure of Gauge Theories . Cambridge University Press, 1985, ISBN 0-521-34785-8
  • The Dawning of Gauge Theory . Princeton University Press, 1997

Web links

Remarks

  1. ^ Mass Differences and Lie Algebras of Finite Order . In: Physical Review Letters . Volume 14, 1965, p. 575. More precisely, he showed that in multiplets of a representation of finite-dimensional Lie groups that include the Poincaré group, all particles must have the same mass.
  2. ↑ Better known is the later proof of a somewhat more general theorem by Sidney Coleman and Jeffrey Mandula from 1967, after whom it is often simply called the Coleman-Mandula theorem .
  3. ^ Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking for Chiral Scalar Superfields . In: Nuclear Physics B . Volume 96, 1975, p. 331
personal data
SURNAME O'Raifeartaigh, Lochlainn
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Irish physicist
DATE OF BIRTH March 11, 1933
PLACE OF BIRTH Clontarf , Dublin
DATE OF DEATH November 18, 2000