Nathan Isgur

Nathan Isgur (born May 24, 1947 in South Houston , Texas , † July 24, 2001 ) was a Canadian - American theoretical physicist .

Isgur grew up in South Houston and studied biology on a scholarship at Caltech , where he switched to physics and received his bachelor's degree in 1968. While working on his doctorate at Berkeley University , he received a draft notice in the Vietnam War , before which he moved to Canada. He received his PhD in 1974 from the University of Toronto under Robert E. Pugh. He took on Canadian citizenship and was able to return to the USA after the general amnesty under President Jimmy Carter . In 1976 he became an assistant professor and then a professor in Toronto. In the 1980s he was one of the directors of the Canadian contribution to the planned electron storage ring CHEER at Fermilab , which was then abandoned in favor of the Tevatron . In 1990 he went back to the USA, where he set up and led the theory group at the Jefferson Lab (with the accelerator CEBAF at Newport News ). At the same time he became a professor at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg (Virginia) . In 1996 he was diagnosed with bone cancer, from which he died five years later.

From the mid-1970s he worked on quark physics , specially excited baryons in a non-relativistic quark model with QCD corrections, often in collaboration with Gabriel Karl from the Canadian University of Guelph . With Mark Wise he developed a QCD approximation for heavy quarks, the effective theory of heavy quarks (Heavy Quark Effective Theory, HQET), with which decays of hadrons with such heavy quarks (such as Charm, Bottom, Top) can be calculated.

Isgur was a member of the Royal Society of Canada and a Fellow of the American Physical Society . He received the Herzberg Prize and the Rutherford Medal. In 2001 he received the Sakurai Prize with Mark Wise and Mikhail Woloschin .

literature

• Isgur, Karl Hadron spectroscopy and quarks , Physics Today, November 1983

Web links

• Gabriel Karl, Pekka Sinervo: In Memoriam Nathan Isgur, 1947–2001. Archived from the original on January 28, 2004 . 
• Jefferson Lab, international nuclear physics community lose Nathan Isgur, leading theoretical physicist. Jefferson Lab, July 24, 2001, archived from the original on July 8, 2003 . 
• 2001 JJ Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics Recipient. APS(English).