Sidney Drell

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sidney David Drell (born September 13, 1926 in Atlantic City , New Jersey , † December 21, 2016 in Palo Alto , California ) was an American theoretical elementary particle physicist, important government advisor in the United States and known there from public debates on arms control .

life and work

Drell studied in Princeton (BA 1946) and at the University of Illinois, where he received his master's degree in 1947 and his doctorate in 1949 with Sidney Dancoff . In 1956 he went to Stanford, where he worked at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) from its establishment in 1963 . From 1969 to 1986 he was head of the theoretical physics department there. Most recently he was Deputy Director of the SLAC. In 1998 he retired.

Drell dealt with quantum field theory and elementary particle physics and is u. a. for the Drell-Yan process is known in which an impact to the nucleons from the pair annihilation of curd via an exchange of a photon or Z boson lepton pairs are generated (an anti-curd thereby comes from the vacuum fluctuations of the " sea quark ") . It provides information about the quark distribution in nucleons. With James Bjorken he wrote two textbooks on quantum field theory and relativistic quantum mechanics , which were standard works in the USA for a long time. Since they were no longer updated, the Introduction to Quantum Field Theory by Peskin and Schröder has now taken its place as the most widely used textbook in this field.

Drell was politically active in arms control early on and was a critic of the Reagan administration's SDI project in the 1980s. He was one of the co-founders of the Stanford Center for international security and arms control and was its co-director from 1983 to 1989. He was a founding member of JASON (a group of independent academics advising US government agencies on defense matters). From 1992 to 2001 he was a member of the US President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Drell also acted in an advisory capacity on numerous committees, including a. 1990/91 he was head of a committee that briefed the Armed Forces Committee of the House of Representatives on the security of nuclear weapons, and Chairman of the Review Board of the Intelligence Technology Innovation Center (2001/02), 2001–03 advisor to the NNSA (National Nuclear Security Administration), on the Council of Foreign Relations in New York and on the US Government Advisory Committee on Nuclear Non-Proliferation. He was also a member of the University of California's body that controls the laboratories in Livermore, Los Alamos and Lawrence Berkeley Lab.

Sidney Drell was married and had three children, u. a. by Persis Drell (* 1955), the former (2007–2012) director of the SLAC. In his spare time he played the violin.

Prizes and awards

Drell was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1961/62 and 1971/72, and a MacArthur Fellow in 1984 . His numerous prizes include the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award , the Heinz Award for Public Policy (2005) and the Russian Pomeranchuk Prize (1998). In 2000 he received the Enrico Fermi Prize and the University of California Presidential Medal. In 2001 he received the National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal from the CIA (mainly for his contributions to the expansion of arms surveillance with spy satellites). In 1999/2000 he was Linus Pauling Lecturer at Stanford and recipient of the Linus Pauling Medal. For 2011 he was awarded the National Medal of Science . He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1971), the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, the American Philosophical Society and the Academia Europaea . In 1986 he was President of the American Physical Society , whose Leo Szilard Award he received in 1980. For nine years he was Chairman of the Department of Energy's High Energy Physics Panel. Drell had been a Fellow of the Hoover Institution since 1998 . He was a member of the Board of Governors of the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot , Israel.

Fonts

On quantum field theory and elementary particle physics:

  • with James Bjorken : Relativistic Quantum Mechanics Bibliographisches Institut, Mannheim 1990, (BI university pocket books; 98 / 98a) ISBN 3-411-00098-8 - engl. Original edition: Relativistic Quantum Mechanics . McGraw-Hill, New York 1964, ISBN 0-07-005493-2 .
  • with James Bjorken : Relativistic Quantum Field Theory . [German Translated by: J. Benecke, D. Maison, E. Riedel]. - [unchanged. Nachdr.] BI-Wissenschaftsverlag, Mannheim / Zurich 1993. (BI-University paperback ; 101), ISBN 3-411-00101-1 - engl. Original edition: Relativistic Quantum Fields. McGraw-Hill, New York 1965, ISBN 0-07-005494-0 .
  • with Fredrik Zachariasen : Electromagnetic Structure of Nucleons . Oxford 1961
  • with Zachariases: Form factors in quantum electrodynamics . In: Physical Review Volume 111, 1958, p. 1727
  • with Donald J. Levy and Tung-Mow Yan: A field theoretic model for electron-nucleon deep inelastic scattering . Physical Review Letters , Vol. 22, 1969, pp. 744-748
  • with Tung-Mow Yan: Partons and their applications at high energies . In: Annals of physics . Volume 66, 1971, p. 578
  • with Stanley J. Brodsky: The Present Status of Quantum Electrodynamics . In: Annual Review of Nuclear Physics . Volume 21, 1970, pp. 147-194
  • When is a particle? . In: Physics Today . Volume 31, June 1978, pp. 23-32, also in: The American Journal of Physics . Volume 46, 1978, pp. 597-606

about disarmament and a .:

  • Sidney Drell on Arms Control (editor Kenneth W. Thompson), University Press of America, 1988
  • Facing the threat of nuclear weapons . University of Washington Press 1983, 2nd edition 1989 (1983 Danz Lectures at the University of Washington)
  • with Farley and Holloway: The Reagan Strategic Defense Initiative: A Technical, Political, and Arms Control Assessment . 1984
  • with McGeorge Bundy and William J. Crowe: Reducing Nuclear Danger . Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1993
  • Editor with Abrhama Sofaer and George Wilson: The New Terror: Facing the Threat of Biological and Chemical Weapons . Hoover Institution Press, 1999
  • In the Shadow of the Bomb: Physics and Arms Control . American Institute of Physics 1993
  • with James Goodby: The gravest danger - nuclear weapons . Hoover Press 2003
  • Nuclear Weapons, Scientists, and the Post-Cold War Challenge . World Scientific 2007 (reprints of its articles)
  • Editor with Sergej Kapitsa : Sakharov remembered . American Institute of Physics 1991
  • with Wolfgang Panofsky: The Case Against Strategic Defense: Technical and Strategical Realities . In: Issues in Science and Technology . Volume 1, No. 1, Fall 1984, pp. 45-65.
  • with Frank von Hippel: Limited nuclear war . In: Scientific American . November 1976

Web links

swell

  1. ↑ Taylor Kubota: Sidney Drell, theoretical physicist and national security expert at Stanford, dies at 90 . Stanford University , December 22, 2016, accessed December 22, 2016.
  2. ↑ Sidney D. Drell and Tung-Mow Yan: Massive Lepton Pair Production in Hadron-Hadron Collisions at High-Energies . In: Physical Review Letters . Volume 25, 1970, pp. 316-320, Erratum p. 902; also in DB Lichtenberg and SP Rosen (eds.): Developments In The Quark Theory Of Hadrons . Volume 1, pp. 454-458; Sidney D. Drell and Tung-Mow Yan: Partons and their applications at high energies . In: Annals of Physics . Volume 66, 1971, pp. 578-623
personal data
SURNAME Drell, Sidney
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Drell, Sidney D .; Drell, Sidney David
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH September 13, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH Atlantic City , New Jersey
DATE OF DEATH December 21, 2016
Place of death Palo Alto , California