Valentine Telegdi

Valentine Louis Telegdi , called Vince, (as Telegdi Bálint ; born January 1, 1922 in Budapest , † April 8, 2006 in Pasadena ) was an American experimental physicist.

Life

Telegdi was the son of Hungarian parents who lived in Bulgaria, where he also grew up. He attended technical schools in Vienna and Brussels. From 1940 to 1943 he was employed by a patent attorney in Milan , then he went to Switzerland with his mother. He then studied chemical engineering in Lausanne at EPFL (diploma 1946). Through the mediation of Ernst Stückelberg , where he had attended lectures, he was admitted to the ETH Zurich , where he was initially employed in the physics group as a "chemical assistant" and because of his ability to solve physics problems from his boss Paul Scherrer was also used as an assistant for the practice operation. In 1947 he also spent a few months with Powell's famous group of experimenters in Bristol , which at that time found various mesons in cosmic radiation . In 1950 he did his doctorate with Paul Scherrer and Wolfgang Pauli on the disintegration of a carbon nucleus into alpha particles when bombarded with gamma rays , whereby he worked on the experimental part (with core emulsions ) as well as a theoretical part (model of the structure of the carbon nucleus from alpha particles). In 1950 he married Lia Leonardi there. In 1951 he became an instructor at the University of Chicago (on the mediation of Victor Weisskopf and Gregor Wentzel ), where he a. a. worked with Murray Gell-Mann ( Physical Review. Volume 91, 1953, p. 169) and in 1954 took over the leadership of a group for particle detection with emulsions from Enrico Fermi , who had died in the same year. In 1956 he spent a few months at the Institute for Advanced Study and in the same year became a professor in Chicago, from 1972 "Enrico Fermi Distinguished Professor". In 1966 he was visiting professor at Harvard . From 1976 until his retirement in 1989 he was a professor at ETH Zurich, where he also dealt with atomic physics, alongside his particle physics group at CERN . The reasons for the change were his dissatisfaction with the development of the physics department in Chicago (which, according to Telegdi's words, had been in constant decline since Fermi's death) and with the only short-term, bureaucratic research funding in the USA. He spent a large part of the time at CERN then and later until shortly before his death. Since 1981 he has also been a regular visiting scientist at Caltech in Pasadena (where he was already in 1953), where he a. a. worked with Gell-Mann (about fundamentals of quantum mechanics), Felix Boehm and Richard Feynman .

Since 1968 Telegdi was a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, since 1970 of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . He was also a member of several other national academies (including Italy, Hungary, Russia) and from 2003 a foreign member of the Royal Society in London. In 1991 he received the Wolf Prize with Maurice Goldhaber and in 1995 the Julius Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society . He holds honorary doctorates from the Universities of Leuven, Budapest and Chicago (1991).

Works

In 1956 he was one of the discoverers of the parity violation when investigating (with Jerome Friedman from his group, who later won the Nobel Prize) the muon decay (at the same time he was discovered by CS Wu and the group of Leon M. Lederman , Richard Garwin , Marcel Weinrich). In his own words, the two weeks he spent in Italy for his father's funeral were responsible for the belated publication of their findings, so Wu got ahead of them. In 1957 he demonstrated the VA structure of the weak interaction in beta decay of the neutron ( predicted by Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann at the time ) using nuclear emulsion techniques and also in 1960/61 with investigations into the hyperfine structure during muon capture . In 1970 he carried out a precise measurement of the fine structure constant from the hyperfine structure of the muonium (the analog of positronium with muons). With Valentine Bargmann and Louis Michel in 1959 he developed the Bargmann-Michel-Telegdi equation for the precession of spin in a magnetic field ( Physical Review Letters. Volume 2, 1959, p. 435). He used the equation for the measurement of the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon (the deviation of the g-factor from the value 2) at CERN with Garwin 1959/60 ("g − 2 experiment"). Previously, Crane et al. a. measured the g-factor of the electron. Telegdi was also a pioneer in studying the Kaon system. In the 1980s, his group carried out the NA10 experiment at CERN (generation of muon pairs with the Drell-Yan process, from which study of the pion structure function ).

Web links

• Martin, Ericson zu Telegdi, CERN Courier
• Oral History Interview by Telegdi, PDF file (281 kB)
• VL Telegdi, Mind over matter: The intellectual content of experimental physics , CERN-90-09

Remarks

1. ↑ the only book he has published is his co-authorship at the University of Chicago Graduate Problems in Physics in 1967, which has also been translated into Russian
2. ↑ Royal Society elections recognize research in particles and waves , CERN-Courier of October 6, 2003 on the occasion of admission to the Royal Society, as of October 20, 2009 (English)
3. ↑ Oral History Interview, Caltech 2002. On Lee and Yang, who received the Nobel Prize as theorists for predicting parity violation - for Telegdi just one of many proposals they made: "They didn't find anything - they proposed that it could exist. " Wu did not receive a Nobel Prize either.