Steven Frautschi

Steven C. Frautschi (born December 6, 1933 ) is an American theoretical physicist.

Frautschi grew up in Madison (Wisconsin) and studied from the age of 16 at Harvard University with John H. van Vleck . In 1954 he graduated and studied (after a one-year stay in Europe, which he explored by bicycle) at Stanford University , where he received his doctorate in 1958 under Sidney Drell . He then worked as a postdoc with Hideki Yukawa in Kyoto and with Geoffrey Chew and Stanley Mandelstam at the University of California, Berkeley . He was at Cornell University in 1961 and at Caltech in 1962 at the invitation of Murray Gell-Mann . In 1962 he became an assistant professor there. Today he is professor of theoretical physics there. In 1964 he received a research grant ( Sloan Research Fellowship ) from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation .

Frautschi is best known for his work on the S-matrix theory of elementary particle physics in the 1960s. In 1960 he and Geoffrey Chew discovered that the mesons of the strong interaction can be arranged on linear regge trajectories on which the square of the mass increases linearly with the spin of the mesons. In order to be able to describe the behavior of the scattering cross-sections at very high energies, they introduced the pomeron into western literature (previously in Russia by Isaak Pomerantschuk and Wladimir Naumowitsch Gribow ). Frautschi is known for his “Statistical Bootstrap” model in the late 1960s / early 1970s (also independent of Rolf Hagedorn ), from which it follows that the number of hadron states increases exponentially with energy, today viewed as a result of a deconfinement phase transition . In the late 1970s he developed the concept of color superconductivity .

Fonts

• Regge Poles and S-Matrix Theory . 1963

Web links

• Oral History Interview at Caltech

References

1. ^ "Statistical Bootstrap Model of Hadrons", Physical Review D, Vol. 3, 1971, p. 2821