Sam Treiman

Sam Bard Treiman (born May 27, 1925 in Chicago , Illinois , † November 30, 1999 in New York City ) was an American theoretical physicist.

Treiman grew up as the son of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania and Russia in Chicago. He studied from 1942 chemical engineering at Northwestern University and, interrupted by military service in World War II, in which he radar systems in the Pacific repaired, physics at the University of Chicago (then a famous school of elementary particles physicists led Enrico Fermi ), where he 1952 John Alexander Simpson received his PhD . He was then an instructor at Princeton University , 1958 Associate Professor and 1963 Professor. From 1977 he was there Eugene V. Higgins Professor of Physics. From 1981 to 1987 he was head of the physics faculty at Princeton. In 1998 he retired . In 1999 he died of leukemia .

Treiman was mainly concerned with elementary particle physics, staying close to the experiments and proposing new experimental reviews. He began with the investigation of elementary particles in cosmic rays , u. a. of decays of K mesons via the weak interaction . After the discovery of the parity violation in the weak interaction in 1957, he and John David Jackson and Wyld re- analyzed the beta decay from this point of view and proposed experiments to find a possible violation of the time-reversal invariance . The Goldberger-Treiman relation is named after him and Marvin Goldberger , which describes the decay rate of the charged pion in the weak interaction in electron or muon and the corresponding neutrino with the mass of the pion , the weak axial coupling constant (measured in beta decay ) and the pion -Nucleon coupling constant of the strong interaction g: (experimentally fulfilled with about 10% accuracy). This led to the PCAC (Partially conserved axial vector current) hypothesis of the approximate chiral symmetry in the strong interaction, which in the 1960s led to many predictions in the context of the "current algebra", such as the Callan-Treiman relations in 1966 in the K meson - Decay by Curtis Callan and Treiman themselves or the Adler-Weisberger relations (by Treiman's pupil Stephen Adler ). In 1971 he and David Gross investigated the scaling behavior (previously observed with deep inelastic scattering) in theories with the exchange of gluons as vector mesons, a forerunner of the later, more precise analysis in quantum chromodynamics . In 1972 he and Abraham Pais proposed a test for the presence of neutral currents in the electroweak theory . He also wrote an early paper with Frank Wilczek , Toussaint, and Anthony Zee on a possible explanation of baryon asymmetry in the universe from the observed CP violation . ${\displaystyle \,f_{\pi }}$ ${\displaystyle \,m_{\pi }}$ ${\displaystyle \,g_{A}}$ ${\displaystyle \,gf_{\pi }=m_{\pi }g_{A}}$

Treiman became a Sloan Research Fellow in 1959 . He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences , the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society . In 1995 he received the Oersted Medal for his teaching achievements. His PhD students included Steven Weinberg , Curtis Callan , Stephen Adler, Glennys Farrar, Kazuo Fujikawa, Jonathan Rosner, Nicola Khuri, and YS Kim.

He was an advisor to the US government (e.g. in plasma physics, physics teaching, and strategic planning) and a member of the JASON Defense Advisory Group . From 1970 he built up the theory group at the newly founded Fermilab .

He had been married to the psychologist Joan Little (a student of Bruno Bettelheim ) since 1952 and had three children.

Fonts

• The Odd Quantum. Princeton University Press, 1999.
• A Life in Particle Physics. Autobiography. In: Annual Review Nuclear Particle Physics. Volume 46, 1996, p. 1.

Web links

• Stephen Adler biography in the Biographical Memoirs National Academy
• Biography at the APS
• Sam Treiman in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Jackson, Treiman and Wyld: Possible tests of time reversal invariance in beta decay . In: Physical Review . Volume 106, 1958, p. 417
2. ^ Goldberger and Treiman: Decay of the Pi Meson . In: Physical Review . Volume 110, 1958, p. 1178
3. ↑ Callan and Treiman: Equal time commutators in K-Meson decay . In: Physical Review Letters . Volume 16, 1966, p. 153
4. ^ Gross and Treiman: Light cone structure of current commutators in quark-gluon model . In: Physical Review D . Volume 4, 1971, p. 1059
5. ^ Pais and Treiman: Neutral current effects in a class of gauge field theories . In: Physical Review D . Volume 6, 1972, p. 2600
6. ^ Treiman, Toussaint, Wilczek and Zee: Matter-Antimatter Accounting, Thermodynamics and Black Hole Radiation . In: Physical Review D . Volume 19, 1979, p. 1036