Tony Skyrme

Tony Hilton Roy Skyrme (born December 5, 1922 in Lewisham , Kent , † June 25, 1987 ) was a British theoretical physicist who dealt with nuclear physics.

Live and act

Skyrme attended Eton College from 1936 and went to Trinity College , Cambridge in 1940 on a scholarship . After graduating in 1943, he worked for Rudolf Peierls in the British atomic bomb project (Tube Alloy Project), where he helped experimenters with geometric corrections for measuring devices, investigated gas diffusion during uranium enrichment and an analytical formula for the equation of state of air developed in the pressure and temperature ranges after an atomic bomb explosion. He was also a member of the British Mission to Los Alamos in 1944, where he was involved in the calculations of the implosion process of the plutonium bomb. In 1946 he obtained his doctorate in Cambridge with Peierls (Hydrodynamical theory and the reaction zone in high explosives) and was then a member of Peierls' theory group in Birmingham . In 1949 he was with Victor Weisskopf at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and then in 1949/50 at the Institute for Advanced Study . 1950 to 1961 he was at the nuclear research center AERE (Atomic Energy Research Establishment) in Harwell . From 1954 he was head of the group for theoretical nuclear physics, where, among others, John Bell worked (as well as the head of the theoretical department Brian Flowers , JP Elliott , Franz Mandl , AM Lane , Walter Marshall ). From 1962 to 1964 he was at Malaya University in Kuala Lumpur after visiting Malaysia on a world tour. From 1964 he succeeded Peierls as professor of theoretical physics in Birmingham.

Skyrme found a z. B. in Hartree-Fock approximations or shell model calculations much used parameterization of the effective core interaction (Skyrme potential) and developed a topological soliton model of the nucleons , that of boson fields (a nonlinear classical field, which corresponds to the exchange mesons of the core interaction) starts to model fermions (nucleons) as its solitons ( skyrmions ). It became particularly popular in the early 1980s with the work of Edward Witten and bag models. In the context of the shell model , he showed the possibility of deriving other description models of the core (an alpha-particle model with J. Perring), and showed the elimination of "spurious states" (unphysical states) in the shell model with Elliott. He also studied muon-induced nuclear fusion , applied the Brueckner theory of nuclear matter to the derivation of spin-orbit interaction in the shell model, and examined collective nuclear models. Skyrme was reluctant to publish his work, many important works (such as the one on the quantum mechanical three-body problem in nuclear scattering) remained unpublished.

In 1949 he married the experimental nuclear physicist Dorothy Millest.

In 1985 he received the Hughes Medal from the Royal Society .

Fonts

• Collected works of T. Skyrme with commentary, World Scientific 1994 ( Gerry Brown comment ), with a description of his work by Richard Dalitz .

Web links

• Literature by and about Tony Skyrme in the WorldCat bibliographic database

Individual evidence

1. ^ "A nuclear pseudo-potential", Proc. of the Rehovot conference on nuclear structure, 1957 ( Harry Lipkin , editor)
2. ↑ Skyrme A non linear theory of strong interactons , Proc. Roy. Soc. A 247, 1958, p. 260, A unified model of K and Pi-Mesons , Proc. Roy. Soc. A 252, 1959, p. 236, A nonlinear field theory , Proc. Royal Society A 260, 1961, pp. 127-138, Particle states in a quantized meson field , Proc. Roy. Soc. A 262, 1961, p. 237
3. ↑ Skyrme himself reports on the origin of the Skyrmion model in Dalitz, Stinchcombe (editor) A Breadth of Physics - Proc. of the R. Peierl's 80th Birthday Symposium , 1988
4. ^ Forerunner of later efforts to derive interacting boson models from microscopic shell model calculations