1.
Quantum field theory
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QFT treats particles as excited states of the underlying physical field, so these are called field quanta. In quantum field theory, quantum mechanical interactions among particles are described by interaction terms among the corresponding underlying quantum fields and these interactions are conveniently visualized by Feynman diagrams, which are a formal tool of relativistically covariant perturbation theory, serving to evaluate particle processes. The first achievement of quantum theory, namely quantum electrodynamics, is still the paradigmatic example of a successful quantum field theory. Ordinarily, quantum mechanics cannot give an account of photons which constitute the prime case of relativistic particles, since photons have rest mass zero, and correspondingly travel in the vacuum at the speed c, a non-relativistic theory such as ordinary QM cannot give even an approximate description. Photons are implicit in the emission and absorption processes which have to be postulated, for instance, the formalism of QFT is needed for an explicit description of photons. In fact most topics in the development of quantum theory were related to the interaction of radiation and matter. However, quantum mechanics as formulated by Dirac, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger in 1926–27 started from atomic spectra, as soon as the conceptual framework of quantum mechanics was developed, a small group of theoreticians tried to extend quantum methods to electromagnetic fields. A good example is the paper by Born, Jordan & Heisenberg. The basic idea was that in QFT the electromagnetic field should be represented by matrices in the way that position. The ideas of QM were thus extended to systems having a number of degrees of freedom. The inception of QFT is usually considered to be Diracs famous 1927 paper on The quantum theory of the emission and absorption of radiation, here Dirac coined the name quantum electrodynamics for the part of QFT that was developed first. Employing the theory of the harmonic oscillator, Dirac gave a theoretical description of how photons appear in the quantization of the electromagnetic radiation field. Later, Diracs procedure became a model for the quantization of fields as well. These first approaches to QFT were further developed during the three years. P. Jordan introduced creation and annihilation operators for fields obeying Fermi–Dirac statistics and these differ from the corresponding operators for Bose–Einstein statistics in that the former satisfy anti-commutation relations while the latter satisfy commutation relations. The methods of QFT could be applied to derive equations resulting from the treatment of particles, e. g. the Dirac equation, the Klein–Gordon equation. Schweber points out that the idea and procedure of second quantization goes back to Jordan, in a number of papers from 1927, some difficult problems concerning commutation relations, statistics, and Lorentz invariance were eventually solved. The first comprehensive account of a theory of quantum fields, in particular
2.
Ernest Rutherford
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Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson, OM, FRS was a New Zealand-born British physicist who came to be known as the father of nuclear physics. Encyclopædia Britannica considers him to be the greatest experimentalist since Michael Faraday and this work was done at McGill University in Canada. Rutherford moved in 1907 to the Victoria University of Manchester in the UK, Rutherford performed his most famous work after he became a Nobel laureate. He conducted research that led to the first splitting of the atom in 1917 in a reaction between nitrogen and alpha particles, in which he also discovered the proton. Rutherford became Director of the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge in 1919, after his death in 1937, he was honoured by being interred with the greatest scientists of the United Kingdom, near Sir Isaac Newtons tomb in Westminster Abbey. The chemical element rutherfordium was named after him in 1997, Ernest Rutherford was the son of James Rutherford, a farmer, and his wife Martha Thompson, originally from Hornchurch, Essex, England. James had emigrated to New Zealand from Perth, Scotland, to raise a little flax, Ernest was born at Brightwater, near Nelson, New Zealand. His first name was mistakenly spelled Earnest when his birth was registered, Rutherfords mother Martha Thompson was a schoolteacher. He studied at Havelock School and then Nelson College and won a scholarship to study at Canterbury College, University of New Zealand, in 1898 Thomson recommended Rutherford for a position at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He was to replace Hugh Longbourne Callendar who held the chair of Macdonald Professor of physics and was coming to Cambridge, in 1901 he gained a DSc from the University of New Zealand. In 1907 Rutherford returned to Britain to take the chair of physics at the Victoria University of Manchester, during World War I, he worked on a top secret project to solve the practical problems of submarine detection by sonar. In 1916 he was awarded the Hector Memorial Medal, in 1919 he returned to the Cavendish succeeding J. J. Thomson as the Cavendish professor and Director. Between 1925 and 1930 he served as President of the Royal Society, in 1933, Rutherford was one of the two inaugural recipients of the T. K. Sidey Medal, set up by the Royal Society of New Zealand as an award for outstanding scientific research. For some time before his death, Rutherford had a hernia, which he had neglected to have fixed. Despite an emergency operation in London, he died four days afterwards of what physicians termed intestinal paralysis, after cremation at Golders Green Crematorium, he was given the high honour of burial in Westminster Abbey, near Isaac Newton and other illustrious British scientists. At Cambridge, Rutherford started to work with J. J. Thomson on the effects of X-rays on gases. Hearing of Becquerels experience with uranium, Rutherford started to explore its radioactivity, continuing his research in Canada, he coined the terms alpha ray and beta ray in 1899 to describe the two distinct types of radiation. He then discovered that thorium gave off a gas which produced an emanation which was itself radioactive and he found that a sample of this radioactive material of any size invariably took the same amount of time for half the sample to decay – its half-life
3.
J. J. Thomson
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He was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of London and appointed to the Cavendish Professorship of Experimental Physics at the Cambridge Universitys Cavendish Laboratory in 1884. Thomson is also credited with finding the first evidence for isotopes of an element in 1913. His experiments to determine the nature of positively charged particles, with Francis William Aston, were the first use of mass spectrometry, Thomson was awarded the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the conduction of electricity in gases. Seven of his students, including his son George Paget Thomson and his record is comparable only to that of the German physicist Arnold Sommerfeld. Joseph John Thomson was born 18 December 1856 in Cheetham Hill, Manchester, Lancashire and his mother, Emma Swindells, came from a local textile family. His father, Joseph James Thomson, ran a bookshop founded by a great-grandfather. He had a two years younger than he was, Frederick Vernon Thomson. J. J. Thomson was a devout Anglican and his early education was in small private schools where he demonstrated outstanding talent and interest in science. In 1870 he was admitted to Owens College at the young age of 14. His parents planned to enroll him as an engineer to Sharp-Stewart & Co, a locomotive manufacturer. He moved on to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1876, in 1880 he obtained his BA in mathematics. He applied for and became a Fellow of Trinity College in 1881, Thomson received his MA in 1883. Thomson was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society on 12 June 1884, on 22 December 1884 Thomson was chosen to become Cavendish Professor of Physics at the University of Cambridge. The appointment caused considerable surprise, given that such as Richard Glazebrook were older. Thomson was known for his work as a mathematician, where he was recognized as an exceptional talent. In 1890, Thomson married Rose Elisabeth Paget, daughter of Sir George Edward Paget, KCB and they had one son, George Paget Thomson, and one daughter, Joan Paget Thomson. He was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1906, in recognition of the merits of his theoretical and experimental investigations on the conduction of electricity by gases. He was knighted in 1908 and appointed to the Order of Merit in 1912, in 1914 he gave the Romanes Lecture in Oxford on The atomic theory
4.
James Chadwick
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Sir James Chadwick, CH, FRS was an English physicist who was awarded the 1935 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of the neutron in 1932. In 1941, he wrote the draft of the MAUD Report. He was the head of the British team that worked on the Manhattan Project during the Second World War and he was knighted in England in 1945 for his achievements in physics. Chadwick graduated from the Victoria University of Manchester in 1911, where he studied under Ernest Rutherford, at Manchester, he continued to study under Rutherford until he was awarded his MSc in 1913. The same year, Chadwick was awarded an 1851 Research Fellowship from the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 and he elected to study beta radiation under Hans Geiger in Berlin. Using Geigers recently developed Geiger counter, Chadwick was able to demonstrate that beta radiation produced a continuous spectrum, still in Germany when the First World War broke out in Europe, he spent the next four years in the Ruhleben internment camp. Chadwick followed his discovery of the neutron by measuring its mass and he anticipated that neutrons would become a major weapon in the fight against cancer. During the Second World War, Chadwick carried out research as part of the Tube Alloys project to build a bomb, while his Liverpool lab. When the Quebec Agreement merged his project with the American Manhattan Project, he part of the British Mission. He surprised everyone by earning the almost-complete trust of project director Leslie R. Groves, for his efforts, Chadwick received a knighthood in the New Year Honours on 1 January 1945. In July 1945, he viewed the Trinity nuclear test, after this, he served as the British scientific advisor to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission. Uncomfortable with the trend toward Big Science, Chadwick became the Master of Gonville, James Chadwick was born in Bollington, Cheshire, on 20 October 1891, the first child of John Joseph, a cotton spinner, and Anne Mary Knowles, a domestic servant. He was named James after his paternal grandfather, in 1895, his parents moved to Manchester, leaving him in the care of his maternal grandparents. Instead he attended the Central Grammar School for Boys in Manchester and he now had two younger brothers, Harry and Hubert, a sister had died in infancy. At the age of 16, he sat two examinations for university scholarships, and won both of them, Chadwick chose to attend Victoria University of Manchester, which he entered in 1908. He meant to study maths, but enrolled in physics by mistake, like most students, he lived at home, walking the 4 miles to the university and back each day. At the end of his first year, he was awarded a Heginbottom Scholarship to study physics, the idea was that they could be measured in terms of the activity of 1 gram of radium, a unit of measurement which would become known as the curie. Rutherfords suggested approach was unworkable—something Chadwick knew but was afraid to tell Rutherford—so Chadwick pressed on, the results became Chadwicks first paper, which, co-authored with Rutherford, was published in 1912
5.
Satyendra Nath Bose
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Satyendra Nath Bose, FRS was an Indian physicist from Bengal specialising in theoretical physics. He is best known for his work on mechanics in the early 1920s, providing the foundation for Bose–Einstein statistics. A Fellow of the Royal Society, he was awarded Indias second highest civilian award, the class of particles that obey Bose–Einstein statistics, bosons, was named after Bose by Paul Dirac. A self-taught scholar and a polymath, he had a range of interests in varied fields including physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, mineralogy, philosophy, arts, literature. He served on many research and development committees in sovereign India, Bose was born in Calcutta, the eldest of seven children. He was the son, with six sisters after him. His ancestral home was in village Bara Jagulia, in the district of Nadia and his schooling began at the age of five, near his home. When his family moved to Goabagan, he was admitted to the New Indian School, in the final year of school, he was admitted to the Hindu School. He passed his examination in 1909 and stood fifth in the order of merit. Naman Sharma and Meghnad Saha, from Dacca, joined the college two years later. Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis and Sisir Kumar Mitra were few years senior to Bose, Bose chose mixed mathematics for his BSc and passed the examinations standing first in 1913 and again stood first in the MSc mixed mathematics exam in 1915. It is said that his marks in the MSc examination created a new record in the annals of the University of Calcutta, after completing his MSc, Bose joined the University of Calcutta as a research scholar in 1916 and started his studies in the theory of relativity. It was an era in the history of scientific progress. Quantum theory had just appeared on the horizon and important results had started pouring in and his father, Surendranath Bose, worked in the Engineering Department of the East Indian Railway Company. In 1914, at age 20, Satyendra Nath Bose married Ushabati Ghosh and they had nine children, two of whom died in early childhood. When he died in 1974, he left behind his wife, as a polyglot, Bose was well versed in several languages such as Bengali, English, French, German and Sanskrit as well as the poetry of Lord Tennyson, Rabindranath Tagore and Kalidasa. He could play the esraj, an instrument similar to a violin. He was actively involved in running night schools that came to be known as the Working Mens Institute and he came in contact with teachers such as Jagadish Chandra Bose, Prafulla Chandra Ray and Naman Sharma who provided inspiration to aim high in life
6.
Enrico Fermi
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Enrico Fermi was an Italian physicist, who created the worlds first nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile-1. He has been called the architect of the age and the architect of the atomic bomb. He was one of the few physicists to excel both theoretically and experimentally and he made significant contributions to the development of quantum theory, nuclear and particle physics, and statistical mechanics. Fermis first major contribution was to statistical mechanics, today, particles that obey the exclusion principle are called fermions. Later Pauli postulated the existence of an invisible particle emitted along with an electron during beta decay. Fermi took up this idea, developing a model that incorporated the postulated particle and his theory, later referred to as Fermis interaction and still later as weak interaction, described one of the four fundamental forces of nature. Fermi left Italy in 1938 to escape new Italian Racial Laws that affected his Jewish wife Laura Capon and he emigrated to the United States where he worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II. Fermi led the team designed and built Chicago Pile-1, which went critical on 2 December 1942. He was on hand when the X-10 Graphite Reactor at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, went critical in 1943, at Los Alamos he headed F Division, part of which worked on Edward Tellers thermonuclear Super bomb. He was present at the Trinity test on 16 July 1945, after the war, Fermi served under J. Robert Oppenheimer on the General Advisory Committee, which advised the Atomic Energy Commission on nuclear matters and policy. Following the detonation of the first Soviet fission bomb in August 1949 and he was among the scientists who testified on Oppenheimers behalf at the 1954 hearing that resulted in the denial of the latters security clearance. Enrico Fermi was born in Rome, Italy, on 29 September 1901 and he was the third child of Alberto Fermi, a division head in the Ministry of Railways, and Ida de Gattis, an elementary school teacher. His only sister, Maria, was two years older than he was, and his brother Giulio was a year older, after the two boys were sent to a rural community to be wet nursed, Enrico rejoined his family in Rome when he was two and a half. Although he was baptised a Roman Catholic in accordance with his grandparents wishes, his family was not particularly religious, as a young boy he shared the same interests as his brother Giulio, building electric motors and playing with electrical and mechanical toys. Giulio died during the administration of an anesthetic for an operation on a throat abscess in 1915, one of Fermis first sources for his study of physics was a book he found at the local market at Campo de Fiori in Rome. Published in 1840, the 900-page Elementorum physicae mathematicae, was written in Latin by Jesuit Father Andrea Caraffa and it covered mathematics, classical mechanics, astronomy, optics, and acoustics, insofar as these disciplines were understood when the book was written. Fermis interest in physics was encouraged by his fathers colleague Adolfo Amidei, who gave him several books on physics and mathematics. Fermi graduated from school in July 1918 and, at Amideis urging
7.
Paul Dirac
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Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac OM FRS was an English theoretical physicist who made fundamental contributions to the early development of both quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. Among other discoveries, he formulated the Dirac equation which describes the behaviour of fermions, Dirac shared the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics with Erwin Schrödinger for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory. He also made significant contributions to the reconciliation of general relativity with quantum mechanics and he was regarded by his friends and colleagues as unusual in character. Albert Einstein said of him This balancing on the path between genius and madness is awful. He is regarded as one of the most significant physicists of the 20th century, Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac was born at his parents home in Bristol, England, on 8 August 1902, and grew up in the Bishopston area of the city. His father, Charles Adrien Ladislas Dirac, was an immigrant from Saint-Maurice, Switzerland and his mother, Florence Hannah Dirac, née Holten, the daughter of a ships captain, was born in Cornwall, England, and worked as a librarian at the Bristol Central Library. Paul had a sister, Béatrice Isabelle Marguerite, known as Betty, and an older brother, Reginald Charles Félix, known as Felix. Dirac later recalled, My parents were terribly distressed, I didnt know they cared so much I never knew that parents were supposed to care for their children, but from then on I knew. Charles and the children were officially Swiss nationals until they became naturalised on 22 October 1919, Diracs father was strict and authoritarian, although he disapproved of corporal punishment. Dirac had a relationship with his father, so much so that after his fathers death, Dirac wrote, I feel much freer now. Charles forced his children to speak to him only in French, when Dirac found that he could not express what he wanted to say in French, he chose to remain silent. Dirac was educated first at Bishop Road Primary School and then at the all-boys Merchant Venturers Technical College, the school was an institution attached to the University of Bristol, which shared grounds and staff. It emphasised technical subjects like bricklaying, shoemaking and metal work and this was unusual at a time when secondary education in Britain was still dedicated largely to the classics, and something for which Dirac would later express his gratitude. Dirac studied electrical engineering on a City of Bristol University Scholarship at the University of Bristols engineering faculty, shortly before he completed his degree in 1921, he sat the entrance examination for St Johns College, Cambridge. He passed, and was awarded a £70 scholarship, but this short of the amount of money required to live. Instead he took up an offer to study for a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics at the University of Bristol free of charge and he was permitted to skip the first year of the course owing to his engineering degree. In 1923, Dirac graduated, once again with first class honours, along with his £70 scholarship from St Johns College, this was enough to live at Cambridge. From 1925 to 1928 he held an 1851 Research Fellowship from the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 and he completed his PhD in June 1926 with the first thesis on quantum mechanics to be submitted anywhere
8.
Richard Feynman
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For his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman, jointly with Julian Schwinger and Sinichirō Tomonaga, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965. Feynman developed a widely used pictorial representation scheme for the mathematical expressions governing the behavior of subatomic particles, during his lifetime, Feynman became one of the best-known scientists in the world. In a 1999 poll of 130 leading physicists worldwide by the British journal Physics World he was ranked as one of the ten greatest physicists of all time. Along with his work in physics, Feynman has been credited with pioneering the field of quantum computing. Tolman professorship in physics at the California Institute of Technology. They were not religious, and by his youth, Feynman described himself as an avowed atheist, like Albert Einstein and Edward Teller, Feynman was a late talker, and by his third birthday had yet to utter a single word. He retained a Brooklyn accent as an adult and that accent was thick enough to be perceived as an affectation or exaggeration – so much so that his good friends Wolfgang Pauli and Hans Bethe once commented that Feynman spoke like a bum. The young Feynman was heavily influenced by his father, who encouraged him to ask questions to challenge orthodox thinking, from his mother, he gained the sense of humor that he had throughout his life. As a child, he had a talent for engineering, maintained a laboratory in his home. When he was in school, he created a home burglar alarm system while his parents were out for the day running errands. When Richard was five years old, his mother gave birth to a brother, Henry Philips. Four years later, Richards sister Joan was born, and the moved to Far Rockaway. Though separated by nine years, Joan and Richard were close and their mother thought that women did not have the cranial capacity to comprehend such things. Despite their mothers disapproval of Joans desire to study astronomy, Richard encouraged his sister to explore the universe, Joan eventually became an astrophysicist specializing in interactions between the Earth and the solar wind. Feynman attended Far Rockaway High School, a school in Far Rockaway, Queens, upon starting high school, Feynman was quickly promoted into a higher math class. A high-school-administered IQ test estimated his IQ at 125—high, but merely respectable according to biographer James Gleick and his sister Joan did better, allowing her to claim that she was smarter. Years later he declined to join Mensa International, saying that his IQ was too low, physicist Steve Hsu stated of the test, I suspect that this test emphasized verbal, as opposed to mathematical, ability. Feynman received the highest score in the United States by a margin on the notoriously difficult Putnam mathematics competition exam
9.
Abdus Salam
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Mohammad Abdus Salam NI, SPk, KBE, was a Pakistani theoretical physicist. A major figure in 20th century theoretical physics, he shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics with Sheldon Glashow and he was the first Pakistani and first Muslim to receive a Nobel Prize in science and the second from an Islamic country to receive any Nobel Prize. He was the director of the Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission. In 1998, following the nuclear tests, the Government of Pakistan issued a commemorative stamp, as a part of Scientists of Pakistan. Salam made a contribution in quantum field theory and in the advancement of Mathematics at Imperial College London. Salam heavily contributed to the rise of Pakistani physics to the community in the world. Even until shortly before his death, Salam continued to contribute to physics, Abdus Salam was born to Chaudhry Muhammad Hussain and Hajira Hussain, into an Ahmadi Muslim Punjabi family. His own grandfather, Gul Muhammad, was a religious scholar apart from being a physician, Salams father was an education officer in the Department of Education of Punjab State in a poor farming district. Salam very early established a reputation throughout the Punjab and later at the University of Cambridge for outstanding brilliance, at age 14, Salam scored the highest marks ever recorded for the matriculation examination at the Punjab University. He won a scholarship to the Government College University of Lahore. Salam was a scholar, interested in Urdu and English literature in which he excelled. But he soon picked up Mathematics as his concentration. A. in Mathematics in 1944 and his father wanted him to join Indian Civil Service. In those days, the Indian Civil Service was the highest aspiration for young university graduates, respecting his fathers wish, Salam tried for the Indian Railways but did not qualify for the service as he failed the medical optical tests because he had worn spectacles since an early age. Therefore, Indian Railways rejected Abdus Salams job application, while in Lahore, Abdus Salam went on to attend the graduate school of Government College University. He received his MA in Mathematics from the Government College University in 1946 and that same year, he was awarded a scholarship to St Johns College, Cambridge, where he completed a BA degree with Double First-Class Honours in Mathematics and Physics in 1949. In 1950, he received the Smiths Prize from Cambridge University for the most outstanding contribution to Physics. Salam returned to Jhang, Punjab and renewed his scholarship and returned to the United Kingdom to do his doctorate and he obtained a PhD degree in Theoretical Physics from the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge. His doctoral thesis titled Developments in quantum theory of fields contained comprehensive, by the time it was published in 1951, it had already gained him an international reputation and the Adams Prize
10.
Higgs mechanism
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In the Standard Model of particle physics, the Higgs mechanism is essential to explain the generation mechanism of the property mass for gauge bosons. Without the Higgs mechanism, all bosons would be massless, but measurements show that the W+, W−, the Higgs field resolves this conundrum. The simplest description of the mechanism adds a quantum field that permeates all space, below some extremely high temperature, the field causes spontaneous symmetry breaking during interactions. The breaking of symmetry triggers the Higgs mechanism, causing the bosons it interacts with to have mass, in the Standard Model, the phrase Higgs mechanism refers specifically to the generation of masses for the W±, and Z weak gauge bosons through electroweak symmetry breaking. The Higgs mechanism was incorporated into modern particle physics by Steven Weinberg and Abdus Salam, in the standard model, at temperatures high enough that electroweak symmetry is unbroken, all elementary particles are massless. At a critical temperature, the Higgs field becomes tachyonic, the symmetry is broken by condensation. Fermions, such as the leptons and quarks in the Standard Model, can acquire mass as a result of their interaction with the Higgs field. In the standard model, the Higgs field is an SU doublet, the Higgs field, through the interactions specified by its potential, induces spontaneous breaking of three out of the four generators of the gauge group U. This is often written as SU × U, because the phase factor also acts on other fields in particular quarks. Three out of its four components would ordinarily amount to Goldstone bosons, the gauge group of the electroweak part of the standard model is SU × U. The group SU is the group of all 2-by-2 unitary matrices with unit determinant, rotating the coordinates so that the second basis vector points in the direction of the Higgs boson makes the vacuum expectation value of H the spinor. The generators for rotations about the x, y, and z axes are by half the Pauli matrices σx, σy, while the Tx and Ty generators mix up the top and bottom components of the spinor, the Tz rotations only multiply each by opposite phases. This phase can be undone by a U rotation of angle 1/2θ, consequently, under both an SU Tz-rotation and a U rotation by an amount 1/2θ, the vacuum is invariant. This combination of generators preserves the vacuum, and defines the unbroken gauge group in the standard model, the part of the gauge field in this direction stays massless, and amounts to the physical photon. In spite of the introduction of spontaneous symmetry breaking, the mass terms preclude chiral gauge invariance, for these fields the mass terms should always be replaced by a gauge-invariant Higgs mechanism. The quantities γμ are the Dirac matrices, and Gψ is the already-mentioned Yukawa coupling parameter, already now the mass-generation follows the same principle as above, namely from the existence of a finite expectation value | ⟨ ϕ ⟩ |, as described above. Again, this is crucial for the existence of the property mass, spontaneous symmetry breaking offered a framework to introduce bosons into relativistic quantum field theories. However, according to Goldstones theorem, these bosons should be massless, the only observed particles which could be approximately interpreted as Goldstone bosons were the pions, which Yoichiro Nambu related to chiral symmetry breaking
11.
David Gross
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David Jonathan Gross is an American theoretical physicist and string theorist. Along with Frank Wilczek and David Politzer, he was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery of asymptotic freedom. He is the director and current holder of the Frederick W. Gluck Chair in Theoretical Physics at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics of the University of California. He is also a faculty member in the UC Santa Barbara Physics Department and is affiliated with the Institute for Quantum Studies at Chapman University in California. He is the Foreign Member of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Gross was born to a Jewish family in Washington, D. C. in February 19,1941. His parents were Nora and Bertram Myron Gross, Gross received his bachelors degree and masters degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, in 1962. He received his Ph. D. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley and he was a Junior Fellow at Harvard University and a Professor at Princeton University until 1997. He was the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1987, the Dirac Medal in 1988, asymptotic freedom, independently discovered by Politzer, was important for the development of quantum chromodynamics. Gross, with Jeffrey A. Harvey, Emil Martinec, the four were to be whimsically nicknamed the Princeton String Quartet. In 2003, Gross was one of 22 Nobel Laureates who signed the Humanist Manifesto and they have two children, Ariela Gross, who is an historian and professor of law at the University of Southern California and the mother of his grandchildren, Raphaela and Sophia. Elisheva Gross, who received a Doctor in psychology at the University of California at Los Angeles and his second wife is Jacquelyn Savani. He has a stepdaughter, Miranda Savani, in Santa Barbara, California
12.
Masatoshi Koshiba
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Masatoshi Koshiba is a Japanese physicist. He jointly won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2002 and he is now Senior Counselor of International Center for Elementary Particle Physics and Emeritus Professor of University of Tokyo. He graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1951 and received a Ph. D. in physics at the University of Rochester, New York, in 1955. At the University of Tokyo he became Associate Professor in March 1963 and then Professor in March 1970 in the Department of Physics, Faculty of Science, from 1987 to 1997, Koshiba taught at Tokai University. In 2002, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics for pioneering contributions to astrophysics. Koshibas award-winning work centred on neutrinos, subatomic particles that had long perplexed scientists, since the 1920s it had been suspected that the Sun shines because of nuclear fusion reactions that transform hydrogen into helium and release energy. Later, theoretical calculations indicated that countless neutrinos must be released in these reactions and, consequently, because neutrinos interact weakly with matter, however, only one in a trillion is stopped on its way to Earth. Neutrinos thus developed a reputation as being undetectable, in the 1980s, Koshiba, drawing on the work done by Raymond Davis Jr, constructed an underground neutrino detector in a zinc mine in Japan. Called Kamiokande II, it was a water tank surrounded by electronic detectors to sense flashes of light produced when neutrinos interacted with atomic nuclei in water molecules. Koshiba was able to confirm Daviss results—that the Sun produces neutrinos, in 1987 Kamiokande also detected neutrinos from a supernova explosion outside the Milky Way. In 2003, he was awarded the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics, Koshiba is a member of the Board of Sponsors of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. He is a fellow of Bangladesh Academy of Sciences In commemoration of the Nobel Prize-winning by Masatoshi Koshiba, Koshiba hall was established at the University of Tokyo. Koshiba, M. Fukuda, Y, et al, evidence for Oscillation of Atmospheric Neutrinos. Koshiba, M. Fukuda, Y, et al, constraints on Neutrino Oscillation Parameters from the Measurement of Day-Night Solar Neutrino Fluxes at Super-Kamiokande. Kamioka Observatory Institute for Cosmic Ray Research List of Japanese Nobel laureates List of Nobel laureates affiliated with the University of Tokyo Prof. Koshiba has won the Nobel prize
