Zhou Guangzhao

Zhou Guangzhao Chinese  周光召 , Pinyin Zhōu Guāngzhāo , W.-G. Chou Kuang-chao ; (Born May 15, 1929 in Changsha ) is a Chinese theoretical physicist.

Life

Zhou is the son of a civil engineer. His brother is the biochemist Guangyu Zhou. He studied physics from 1946 at Tsinghua University with a degree in 1951 and received his doctorate in theoretical physics from Peking University in 1954 . From 1957 to 1960 he was at the JINR in Dubna. He then returned to China, where he worked on the nuclear weapons program and became director of the Nuclear Weapons Research Institute. There he made fundamental contributions to the development of atomic bombs and hydrogen bombs in China. From 1979 he devoted himself to research in elementary particle physics at the Institute for Theoretical Physics of the Academy of Sciences. As a particle physicist, he was also at CERN and the Virginia Polytechnic Institute.

Zhou is mainly concerned with particle physics. He is known for introducing the term Partially Conserved Axial Vector Current (PCAC) in weak interaction theory (1960). In 1957, he introduced the helicity amplitude into the partial wave analysis of high-energy scattering experiments (in the West, Maurice Jacob and Gian-Carlo Wick created a corresponding formalism in 1959) and in the 1980s developed a generating function formalism for many-particle systems of statistical mechanics both in equilibrium and also in non-equilibrium. From the 1980s he published on GUTs , Coset gauge theories , topological properties of gauge field theories, Wess-Zumino models and the like. a.

He has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1987 . From 1987 to 1997 he was president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences , after being its vice-president from 1984 to 1987. Zhou is a Fellow of the Royal Society . He holds honorary doctorates from City College, City University of New York and the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

The asteroid 3462 Zhouguangzhao is named after him.

Fonts

• Guangzhao Zhou and Yueliang Wu (Eds.): Selected Papers of KC Chou. World Scientific, Singapore 2009, ISBN 978-981-4280-38-9 , OCLC 592756144 .

Web links

• Homepage. Retrieved September 13, 2012.
• Portrait at Tsinghua University. Retrieved September 13, 2012.
• Biography at China Vitae. Retrieved September 13, 2012.
• Appreciation from the Royal Society. Retrieved September 13, 2012.

Remarks

1. ↑ On his homepage ( Memento of the original from October 1, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, it is stated that he was the head of the theory section in the Nuclear Weapons Research Institute and chief engineer of the 9th Bureau of the Ministry of Nuclear Industry and director of the 9th Institute of the Ministry of Mechanical Engineering 
2. ↑ At the beginning of the 1960s, Murray Gell-Mann and Maurice Lévy (1960), Yoichiro Nambu and others also derived the Goldberger-Treiman relation from PCAC , and their contributions are better known in the West and are mainly cited in the literature. For example, Stephen Adler reports in his Adventures in Theoretical Physics. Selected Papers , World Scientific, p. 5, he would not have found out about Chou's contribution until much later on a visit to China.
3. ↑ Chou On the determination of the relative parities of elementary particles , Soviet Physics JETP, Volume 34, 1958, p. 710, Chou, MI Shirokov The relativistic theory of reactions involving polarized particles , ibid., P. 851, Chou Selection rules in reactions involving polarized particles , Sov. Phys. JETP, Vol. 35, 1959, p. 543
4. ↑ Appreciation at the Royal Society, see web links

Note: This article places the family name before the person's first name. This is the usual order in Chinese. Zhou is the family name here, Guangzhao is the first name.