Richard Dalitz

Richard Henry Dalitz (born February 28, 1925 in Dimboola , Victoria (Australia) , † January 13, 2006 in Oxford , England ) was an Australian physicist , known for his work in the field of particle physics .

Life

Dalitz studied mathematics and physics at the University of Melbourne . He worked on his doctoral thesis on “Zero-zero transitions in nuclei” from 1946 at the University of Cambridge , with Cecil Powell at Bristol University and from 1949 with Rudolf Peierls at the University of Birmingham . In 1953 Dalitz went to Cornell University , in 1956 he became a professor at the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago . In 1962 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society .

In 1963 he went back to England, this time to Oxford University . One of his students there was the later CERN director Christopher Llewellyn Smith . In 1990 Dalitz retired, but continued to work on physical problems.

plant

In his doctoral thesis, Dalitz dealt with core transitions . However, he was involved in a cosmic ray project in Bristol that studied kaons . In 1951 he then researched the decay of neutral pions . The electron - positron pair that is created next to a photon is called the Dalitz pair after him . In 1954 he introduced a scatter diagram of the invariant masses in three-body decays , which is now called the Dalitz diagram and is a standard tool in particle physics. In these attempts he provided important early insights into parity violation .

In the 1960s he was a pioneer in modeling the behavior of quarks in baryons . With Avraham Gal he explored hyper nuclei . With Gary Goldstein , he carried out important preparatory work for the discovery of the top quark .

The CDD poles in the theory of strong interaction are named after him, Leonardo Castillejo (1924–1995) and Freeman Dyson .

Honors

In 1960 Dalitz was elected as a member ("Fellow") in the Royal Society , which awarded him the Hughes Medal in 1975 and the Royal Medal in 1982 . He was an external member of the Polish Academy of Sciences and, since 1991, of the National Academy of Sciences .

Web links

• Literature by and about Richard Dalitz in the catalog of the German National Library
• Ian JR Aitchison, Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith: Richard Henry Dalitz. February 28, 1925 - January 13, 2006 . In: Biogr. Mems Fell. R. Soc. tape 62 , July 27, 2016, p. 59–88 , doi : 10.1098 / rsbm.2016.0019 (English, royalsocietypublishing.org [PDF]).
• Publications by Richard Dalitz at SPIRES
• Professor RH ("Dick") Dalitz, FRS (1925-2006). Department of Physics, University of Oxford, archived from the original on May 3, 2006 .