Davison Soper

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Davison "Dave" Eugene Soper (21 March 1943, Milwaukee, Wisconsin) is an American theoretical physicist specializing in high energy physics. [1]

Contents

Education and career

Soper received his bachelor's degree in 1965 from Amherst College and his PhD in 1971 under James Bjorken from Stanford University, where he worked with John Kogut. [2] Soper was from 1971 to 1973 an instructor and from 1973 to 1977 an assistant professor at Princeton University. He was appointed in 1977–80 an assistant professor, in 1980–83 an associate professor, and from 1983 to the present a professor at the University of Oregon, where from 2004 to 2007 he was chair of the physics department. [3]

His doctoral dissertation on Null Plane Field Theory dealt with the theory of high energy scattering processes in the parton model. With George Sterman and John C. Collins, he proved a factorization theorem in perturbative quantum chromodynamics (QCD). [4] [5]

Soper is a member of the "Coordinated Theoretical-Experimental Project on QCD“ (CTEQ), whose co-spokesperson he was from 2001 to 2004. He was on the editorial board of Physical Review Letters and Physical Review D .

Honors

In 2009 Soper received with R. Keith Ellis and John C. Collins the Sakurai Prize of the American Physical Society. [6]

He became a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2010. He was cited " For seminal work in Perturbative Quantum Chromodynamics, especially proving theorems on factorization which play a crucial role in interpreting high energy particle collisions." [7]

Selected works

Related Research Articles

Quantum chromodynamics Theory of the strong nuclear interactions

In theoretical physics, quantum chromodynamics (QCD) is the theory of the strong interaction between quarks mediated by gluons, the fundamental particles that make up composite hadrons such as the proton, neutron and pion. QCD is a type of quantum field theory called a non-abelian gauge theory, with symmetry group SU(3). The QCD analog of electric charge is a property called color. Gluons are the force carriers of the theory, just as photons are for the electromagnetic force in quantum electrodynamics. The theory is an important part of the Standard Model of particle physics. A large body of experimental evidence for QCD has been gathered over the years.

Color confinement Particle physics phenomenon

In quantum chromodynamics (QCD), color confinement, often simply called confinement, is the phenomenon that color-charged particles cannot be isolated, and therefore cannot be directly observed in normal conditions below the Hagedorn temperature of approximately 2 terakelvin. Quarks and gluons must clump together to form hadrons. The two main types of hadron are the mesons and the baryons. In addition, colorless glueballs formed only of gluons are also consistent with confinement, though difficult to identify experimentally. Quarks and gluons cannot be separated from their parent hadron without producing new hadrons.

Lattice QCD

Lattice QCD is a well-established non-perturbative approach to solving the quantum chromodynamics (QCD) theory of quarks and gluons. It is a lattice gauge theory formulated on a grid or lattice of points in space and time. When the size of the lattice is taken infinitely large and its sites infinitesimally close to each other, the continuum QCD is recovered.

Two-photon physics Branch of particle physics concerning interactions between two photons

Two-photon physics, also called gamma–gamma physics, is a branch of particle physics that describes the interactions between two photons. Normally, beams of light pass through each other unperturbed. Inside an optical material, and if the intensity of the beams is high enough, the beams may affect each other through a variety of non-linear effects. In pure vacuum, some weak scattering of light by light exists as well. Also, above some threshold of this center-of-mass energy of the system of the two photons, matter can be created.

Perturbative quantum chromodynamics is a subfield of particle physics in which the theory of strong interactions, Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), is studied by using the fact that the strong coupling constant is small in high energy or short distance interactions, thus allowing perturbation theory techniques to be applied. In most circumstances, making testable predictions with QCD is extremely difficult, due to the infinite number of possible topologically-inequivalent interactions. Over short distances, the coupling is small enough that this infinite number of terms can be approximated accurately by a finite number of terms. Although limited in scope, this approach has resulted in the most precise tests of QCD to date.

Jet (particle physics)

A jet is a narrow cone of hadrons and other particles produced by the hadronization of a quark or gluon in a particle physics or heavy ion experiment. Particles carrying a color charge, such as quarks, cannot exist in free form because of QCD confinement which only allows for colorless states. When an object containing color charge fragments, each fragment carries away some of the color charge. In order to obey confinement, these fragments create other colored objects around them to form colorless objects. The ensemble of these objects is called a jet, since the fragments all tend to travel in the same direction, forming a narrow "jet" of particles. Jets are measured in particle detectors and studied in order to determine the properties of the original quarks.

In particle physics, the parton model is a model of hadrons, such as protons and neutrons, proposed by Richard Feynman. It is useful for interpreting the cascades of radiation produced from QCD processes and interactions in high-energy particle collisions.

The J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics, is presented by the American Physical Society at its annual April Meeting, and honors outstanding achievement in particle physics theory. The prize consists of a monetary award, a certificate citing the contributions recognized by the award, and a travel allowance for the recipient to attend the presentation. The award is endowed by the family and friends of particle physicist J. J. Sakurai. The prize has been awarded annually since 1985.

R. Keith Ellis British theoretical physicist

Richard Keith Ellis, is a British theoretical physicist, working at the University of Durham, and a leading authority on perturbative quantum chromodynamics and collider phenomenology.

Christopher Tadeusz Czeslaw Sachrajda is a British physicist. He is a professor of physics at the University of Southampton since 1990.

In physics, vector meson dominance (VMD) was a model developed by J. J. Sakurai in the 1960s before the introduction of quantum chromodynamics to describe interactions between energetic photons and hadronic matter.

George Franklin Sterman is an American theoretical physicist and the Director of the C. N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics at Stony Brook University where he holds the rank Distinguished Professor.

James Bjorken American physicist

James Daniel "BJ" Bjorken is an American theoretical physicist. He was a Putnam Fellow in 1954, received a BS in physics from MIT in 1956, and obtained his PhD from Stanford University in 1959. He was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in the fall of 1962. Bjorken is Emeritus Professor in the SLAC Theory Group at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, and was a member of the Theory Department of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (1979–1989).

Alfred H. Mueller is an American theoretical physicist, and the Enrico Fermi Professor of Physics at Columbia University.

John Clements Collins is a British-born American theoretical physicist and professor of physics at Pennsylvania State University. He attended the University of Cambridge where he obtained a B.A. in mathematics 1971 and a Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 1975. He worked as a postdoc and assistant professor from 1975 to 1980 at Princeton University. Collins was part of the faculty of the Illinois Institute of Technology from 1980 to 1990. From 1990 to the present, he has been a faculty member in the department of physics at Pennsylvania State University where he currently holds the position of Distinguished Professor. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and received the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986. In 2009, he was awarded the Sakurai Prize along with R. Keith Ellis and Davison E. Soper.

Light-front quantization applications

The light front quantization of quantum field theories provides a useful alternative to ordinary equal-time quantization. In particular, it can lead to a relativistic description of bound systems in terms of quantum-mechanical wave functions. The quantization is based on the choice of light-front coordinates, where plays the role of time and the corresponding spatial coordinate is . Here, is the ordinary time, is one Cartesian coordinate, and is the speed of light. The other two Cartesian coordinates, and , are untouched and often called transverse or perpendicular, denoted by symbols of the type . The choice of the frame of reference where the time and -axis are defined can be left unspecified in an exactly soluble relativistic theory, but in practical calculations some choices may be more suitable than others. The basic formalism is discussed elsewhere.

John Benjamin Kogut is an American theoretical physicist, specializing in high energy physics.

Stephen Bernard Libby from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He was awarded the status of Fellow in the American Physical Society, after he was nominated by their American Physical Society in 1999, for the application of quantum field theory to diverse systems including perturbative quantum chromodynamics and transport in the quantum Hall effect, as well as inventing computational algorithms for radiation driven kinetics in plasmas, and the invention of novel short wavelength laser applications.

Lance Jenkins Dixon is an American theoretical particle physicist. He is a professor in the SLAC Theory Group at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) at Stanford University.

G. Peter Lepage Canadian American theoretical physicist

G. Peter Lepage is a Canadian American theoretical physicist and an academic administrator. He was the Harold Tanner Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell University from 2003 to 2013.

References

  1. Davison E. Soper's page at U. of Oregon
  2. Kogut, J.B.; Soper, D.E. (15 May 1970). "Quantum electrodynamics in the infinite-momentum frame". Physical Review D. 1 (10): 2901–2914. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.1.2901. OSTI   1444761.
  3. Vita, Davison E. Soper
  4. Collins, John C.; Soper, Davison E.; Sterman, George (1985). "Factorization for short distance hadron-hadron scattering". Nuclear Physics B. 281: 104–142. doi:10.1016/0550-3213(85)90565-6.
  5. John C. Collins, Davison E. Soper and George Sterman (1989). "Factorization of Hard Processes in QCD". In Mueller, A. H (ed.). Perturbative Quantum Chromodynamics. World Scientific. pp. 1–92. ISBN   9789971505646.
  6. 2009 Sakurai Prize for Davison E. Soper
  7. "APS Fellow Archive". www.aps.org. Archived from the original on 2021-07-17. Retrieved 2021-07-17.