Sidney Coleman

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Sidney Coleman at Harvard University

Sidney Richard Coleman (born March 7, 1937 in Chicago , † November 18, 2007 in Cambridge (Massachusetts) ) was an American theoretical physicist .

life and work

Coleman grew up in Chicago. He studied at the Illinois Institute of Technology (Bachelor's degree in 1957) and received his doctorate in 1962 from the California Institute of Technology under Murray Gell-Mann with the thesis The Structure of Strong Interaction Symmetries . From 1961 he was Corning Lecturer and Fellow at Harvard University , where he was an Assistant Professor in 1963, Associate Professor in 1966 and Professor in 1969. From 1980 he was Donner Professor of Science there. In 2003 he retired.

Coleman worked in the field of particle physics and quantum field theory (QFT). His lectures (e.g. in the summer schools in Erice in Sicily, Italy from 1966, but also in the summer schools in Cargese in Corsica and in Aspen in Colorado) on this field of theoretical physics became famous for their clarity and comprehensibility and were widely used . For 30 years he gave a well-attended QFT lecture at Harvard.

In 1967 Coleman and Jeffrey Mandula showed that there are no non-trivial unions of the space-time symmetries summarized in the Poincaré group with internal symmetries ( Coleman-Mandula theorem , a more special theorem in this direction, Lochlainn O'Raifeartaigh proved in 1965). In the 1970s he examined a. a. with Erick Weinberg spontaneous symmetry breaks due to quantum fluctuations ( Coleman-Weinberg mechanism ). In 1973 he proved the non-existence of goldstone bosons in QFT with 2 dimensions (one space and one time dimension), a variant of the Mermin- Wagner- Hohenberg theorem in statistical mechanics (there it forbids spontaneous breakage in two or fewer dimensions continuous symmetries). Coleman's investigations into the decay of metastable (“false”) vacuum states with applications in cosmology were also influential. According to this theory, new universes arise as expanding bubbles in a false vacuum, i.e. from states of higher energy, which are classically prevented from decay by an energy barrier, but can decay quantum mechanically by tunneling the barrier. In 1988 he came up with a theory to explain the disappearance of cosmological constants . He explained this by the fact that the universe on the Planck scale consists of wormholes through which the universe is connected to other universes. A value of zero for the cosmological constant then results as a kind of interference effect between the different universes.

In 2000 he received the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics and in 1990 the Dirac Medal (ICTP) . He was posthumously awarded the Erice Prize. In 1964 he was a Sloan Research Fellow . He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences , whose NAS Award for Scientific Reviewing he received in 1989, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

In the last years of his life he suffered from some form of Parkinson's disease . In 2005 a conference in his honor was held at Harvard University ("Sidneyfest"), which was attended by many Nobel Prize winners.

His PhD students include David Politzer (whom Coleman supervised on his Nobel Prize work on Asymptotic Freedom ), Erick Weinberg , Ian Affleck , Carl M. Bender , Gregory W. Moore , Philip Nelson , Jeffrey Mandula , Anthony Zee , Paul Steinhardt , Lee Smolin , Leonard Parker , Jacques Distler , David J. Griffiths .

Coleman had been married since 1982. He had a soft spot for science fiction since his youth and also advised some science fiction writers.

Works (selection)

  • Aspects of Symmetry : Selected Erice Lectures, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1985
  • There are no Goldstone Bosons in 2 dimensions , Communications in mathematical physics, Vol. 31, 1973, p. 259
  • Fate of the false vacuum 1: semiclassical analysis , Physical Review D, Vol. 15, 1977, p. 2929, Part 2 with Curtis Callan "Quantum Corrections", Physical Review D, Vol. 16, 1977, p. 1762
  • with De Luccia Gravitational effects on and off vacuum decay , Physical Review D, Vol. 21, 1980, p. 3305
  • with Erick Weinberg: Radiative Corrections of spontaneous symmetry breaking , Physical Review D, Vol. 7, 1973, pp. 1888-1911
  • with Mandula All possible symmetries of the S-Matrix , Physical Review, Vol. 159, 1967, p. 1251 (Coleman-Mandula-Theorem)
  • Why there is nothing rather than something: Theory of the Cosmological Constant , Nuclear Physics B, Vol. 310, 1988, p. 643

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Sidney Coleman in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)Template: MathGenealogyProject / Maintenance / id used
personal data
SURNAME Coleman, Sidney
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Coleman, Sidney Richard (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH March 7, 1937
PLACE OF BIRTH Chicago
DATE OF DEATH November 18, 2007
Place of death Cambridge, Massachusetts