Peter Freund (physicist)

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Peter George Oliver Freund (born September 7, 1936 in Timișoara , Romania ; often as a PGO Freund ; † March 6, 2018 in Chicago ) was an American theoretical physicist .

Life

Freund studied in his hometown at the Polytechnic University of Timişoara , graduating in 1958. After he was almost executed on the street by the secret police Securitate as a student in demonstrations in the aftermath of the Hungarian uprising in November 1956 in Romania , he left Romania in 1959 and went to the University of Vienna , where he in 1960 with the work "on the problem of the structure of elementary particles" at Walter Thirring obtained his doctorate. He then worked as an assistant to Thirring and then went to the University of Geneva . From 1963 he was at the University of Chicago , where he was assistant professor in 1965 and later professor at the Enrico Fermi Institute. Most recently he was Professor Emeritus there. In 1964 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study .

Freund was a fellow of the American Physical Society . He was an honorary doctor of the Western University of Timişoara , the Polytechnic University of Timișoara and an honorary member of the Romanian Academy of Technical Sciences (ASTR). He had also emerged as a short story writer, published in his book "West of West End" (2008) and also in the online literary journal "Exquisite Corpse". With his friend, the writer Radu Ciobanu, who remained in Romania, he wrote the book “Dialogue over the Atlantic”, published in Romanian in 2006, which reflects their different fates. In “A Passion for Discovery” he gave biographical sketches of physicists and mathematicians.

He has been married to a psychiatrist since 1963 and has two daughters. At the instigation of Thirring, he was granted Austrian citizenship in 1961, but took on US citizenship after the Waldheim affair.

plant

Freund was one of the pioneers of the dual model from which string theory emerged. More precisely, he and Haim Harari discovered in 1968 an extension of the original dual model, which, in its later interpretation as string theory, corresponds to closed strings. From the mid-1970s he investigated Kaluza-Klein theories and compactification mechanisms for the extra dimensions, partly with his student Yong Min Cho, and applied these theories to cosmology. In connection with his student Mark Rubin he found z. B. special solutions of eleven-dimensional supergravity from products of compact Einstein manifolds with anti-de-sitter spaces of negative curvature (four- and seven-dimensional).

He also examined number theoretic string versions, p-adic strings, and adelic strings, which serve as model versions for testing conjectures about the mathematical structure of string theories.

With the Chicago mathematician Irving Kaplansky , he classified simple supersymmetries and found mathematical connections from supersymmetries to spaces of negative curvature (such as anti-de-sitter spaces).

In 1985 he discovered a connection between bosonic strings, which only exist in 26 dimensions, and superstrings, which exist in 10 dimensions, which became important for the formulation of heterotic strings .

In the 1960s, Peter Freund made specific predictions for the behavior of the cross sections in the scattering processes of hadrons, which are known as Freund relations. With his student Jim Feigenbaum he also examined the scale behavior of stock markets before stock market crashes .

literature

  • Peter Freund: A passion for discovery. World Scientific, Singapore 2007, ISBN 978-981-270-646-1 .
  • Thomas Appelquist, Alan Chodos, Peter George Oliver Freund: Modern Kaluza Klein Theories. Addison-Wesley, Menlo Park 1987, ISBN 978-020-109-829-7 .
  • Peter GO Freund: Introduction to supersymmetry. Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge 1986, ISBN 0-521-26880-X .

Web links

References

  1. ↑ Louise Lerner: Peter Freund, particle physicist and fiction writer, 1936-2018. University of Chicago, March 13, 2018, accessed March 14, 2018 .
  2. ↑ Obituary Peter GO friend. (pdf) Research Center in Theoretical Physics, West University of Timisoara, 2018, accessed on October 23, 2018 .
  3. ^ Doctor Honoris Causa - Peter George Oliver Freund. Fundatia Politehnica Timisoara, October 14, 2014, accessed October 23, 2018 (Romanian).
  4. ^ Freund, Peter George Oliver (1936-2018) Membru de onoare al ASTR. (pdf) Academia de Ştiinţe Tehnice din România - Filiala Timişoara, March 2018, accessed on October 23, 2018 (Romanian).
  5. ↑ Freund, Physical Review Letters, Vol. 20, 1968, p. 235
  6. ↑ Cho, Freund, Physical Review D, Vol. 12, 1975, p. 1711
  7. ^ Freund "Kaluza Klein Cosmologies", Nuclear Physics B, Vol. 209, 1982, p. 1
  8. ↑ Riemannian manifolds in which the Ricci tensor is proportional to the metric tensor, e.g. B. Vacuum solutions of the equations of general relativity
  9. ^ Freund, Rubin "Dynamics of Dimensional Reduction", Physics Letters B 97, 1980, p. 233
  10. ^ Freund, Mark Olson, Physics Letters B, Vol. 199, 1987, p. 186
  11. ^ Freund, Edward Witten , Physics Letters B, Vol. 199, 1987, p. 191
  12. ↑ Review article L. Brekke, Freund "p-adic Numbers in Physics", Physics Report, Vol. 233, 1993, p. 1
  13. ↑ Freund, Kaplansky Journal of Mathematical Physics Vol. 17, 1976, p. 228
  14. ^ Freund "Superstrings from 26 Dimensions?", Physics Letters B, Vol. 151, 1985, p. 387
  15. ^ Freund, Physical Review Letters, Vol. 15, 1965, p. 929
  16. ↑ International Journal Modern Physics B, Vol. 10, 1996, p. 3737
  17. ↑ Original in the Chicago Tribune not available from Europe for legal reasons.
personal data
SURNAME Friend, peter
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Friend, Peter George Oliver (full name); Friend, PGO
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH September 7, 1936
PLACE OF BIRTH Timișoara , Romania
DATE OF DEATH March 6, 2018
Place of death Chicago