Jeffrey Goldstone | |
---|---|
Born | Manchester, UK | 3 September 1933
Nationality | British |
Alma mater | Trinity College, Cambridge |
Known for | Nambu–Goldstone boson |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Quantum mechanics |
Institutions | MIT Cambridge |
Doctoral advisor | Hans Bethe |
Jeffrey Goldstone (born 3 September 1933) is a British theoretical physicist and an emeritus physics faculty member at the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics.
He worked at the University of Cambridge until 1977. He is famous for the discovery of the Nambu–Goldstone boson. He is currently working on quantum computation.
Born in Manchester, he was educated at Manchester Grammar School and Trinity College, Cambridge, (B.A. 1954, Ph.D. 1958). He worked on the theory of nuclear matter under the guidance of Hans Bethe and developed modifications of Feynman diagrams for non-relativistic many-fermion systems, which are currently referred to as Goldstone diagrams. [1]
Goldstone was a research fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1956 to 1960 and held visiting research posts at Copenhagen, CERN and Harvard. During this time, his research focus shifted to particle physics and he investigated the nature of relativistic field theories with spontaneously broken symmetries. With Abdus Salam and Steven Weinberg, he proved that in such theories zero-mass particles (Nambu–Goldstone bosons) must exist.
From 1962 to 1976, Goldstone was a faculty member at Cambridge. In the early 1970s, with Peter Goddard, Claudio Rebbi and Charles Thorn, he worked out the light-cone quantization theory of relativistic strings. He moved to the USA in 1977 as Professor of Physics at MIT, where he has been the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics since 1983 and was Director of the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics from 1983-89.
Goldstone published research on solitons in quantum field theory with Roman Jackiw and Frank Wilczek, and on the quantum strong law of large numbers with Edward Farhi and Samuel Gutmann. Since 1997, he has been working, with Farhi, Gutmann, Michael Sipser and Andrew Childs, on quantum computation algorithms. [2]
In theoretical physics, quantum field theory (QFT) is a theoretical framework that combines classical field theory, special relativity, and quantum mechanics. QFT is used in particle physics to construct physical models of subatomic particles and in condensed matter physics to construct models of quasiparticles.
The Standard Model of particle physics is the theory describing three of the four known fundamental forces in the universe and classifying all known elementary particles. It was developed in stages throughout the latter half of the 20th century, through the work of many scientists worldwide, with the current formulation being finalized in the mid-1970s upon experimental confirmation of the existence of quarks. Since then, proof of the top quark (1995), the tau neutrino (2000), and the Higgs boson (2012) have added further credence to the Standard Model. In addition, the Standard Model has predicted various properties of weak neutral currents and the W and Z bosons with great accuracy.
Spontaneous symmetry breaking is a spontaneous process of symmetry breaking, by which a physical system in a symmetric state spontaneously ends up in an asymmetric state. In particular, it can describe systems where the equations of motion or the Lagrangian obey symmetries, but the lowest-energy vacuum solutions do not exhibit that same symmetry. When the system goes to one of those vacuum solutions, the symmetry is broken for perturbations around that vacuum even though the entire Lagrangian retains that symmetry.
Peter Ware Higgs is a British theoretical physicist, Emeritus Professor in the University of Edinburgh, and Nobel Prize laureate for his work on the mass of subatomic particles.
In particle and condensed matter physics, Goldstone bosons or Nambu–Goldstone bosons (NGBs) are bosons that appear necessarily in models exhibiting spontaneous breakdown of continuous symmetries. They were discovered by Yoichiro Nambu in particle physics within the context of the BCS superconductivity mechanism, and subsequently elucidated by Jeffrey Goldstone, and systematically generalized in the context of quantum field theory. In condensed matter physics such bosons are quasiparticles and are known as Anderson–Bogoliubov modes.
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 (one of the two classes of particles, the other being fermions) would be considered massless, but measurements show that the W+, W−, and Z0 bosons actually have relatively large masses of around 80 GeV/c2. The Higgs field resolves this conundrum. The simplest description of the mechanism adds a quantum field (the Higgs field) that permeates all space to the Standard Model. 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 Large Hadron Collider at CERN announced results consistent with the Higgs particle on 14 March 2013, making it extremely likely that the field, or one like it, exists, and explaining how the Higgs mechanism takes place in nature. The view of the Higgs mechanism as involving spontaneous symmetry breaking of a gauge symmetry is technically incorrect since by Elitzur's theorem gauge symmetries can never be spontaneously broken. Rather, the Fröhlich–Morchio–Strocchi mechanism reformulates the Higgs mechanism in an entirely gauge invariant way, generally leading to the same results.
Yoichiro Nambu was a Japanese-American physicist and professor at the University of Chicago. Known for his contributions to the field of theoretical physics, he was awarded half of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2008 for the discovery in 1960 of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics, related at first to the strong interaction's chiral symmetry and later to the electroweak interaction and Higgs mechanism. The other half was split equally between Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa "for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature."
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.
In particle physics, chiral symmetry breaking is the spontaneous symmetry breaking of a chiral symmetry – usually by a gauge theory such as quantum chromodynamics, the quantum field theory of the strong interaction. Yoichiro Nambu was awarded the 2008 Nobel prize in physics for describing this phenomenon.
Michael Fredric Sipser is an American theoretical computer scientist who has made early contributions to computational complexity theory. He is a professor of applied mathematics and was the Dean of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The MIT Center for Theoretical Physics (CTP) is the hub of theoretical nuclear physics, particle physics, and quantum information research at MIT. It is a subdivision of MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Science and Department of Physics.
Gerald Stanford "Gerry" Guralnik was the Chancellor’s Professor of Physics at Brown University. In 1964 he co-discovered the Higgs mechanism and Higgs boson with C. R. Hagen and Tom Kibble (GHK). As part of Physical Review Letters' 50th anniversary celebration, the journal recognized this discovery as one of the milestone papers in PRL history. While widely considered to have authored the most complete of the early papers on the Higgs theory, GHK were controversially not included in the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics.
François, Baron Englert is a Belgian theoretical physicist and 2013 Nobel prize laureate.
Carl Richard Hagen is a professor of particle physics at the University of Rochester. He is most noted for his contributions to the Standard Model and Symmetry breaking as well as the 1964 co-discovery of the Higgs mechanism and Higgs boson with Gerald Guralnik and Tom Kibble (GHK). As part of Physical Review Letters 50th anniversary celebration, the journal recognized this discovery as one of the milestone papers in PRL history. While widely considered to have authored the most complete of the early papers on the Higgs theory, GHK were controversially not included in the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Robert Brout was an American theoretical physicist who made significant contributions in elementary particle physics. He was a professor of physics at Université Libre de Bruxelles where he had created, together with François Englert, the Service de Physique Théorique.
The 1964 PRL symmetry breaking papers were written by three teams who proposed related but different approaches to explain how mass could arise in local gauge theories. These three papers were written by: Robert Brout and François Englert; Peter Higgs; and Gerald Guralnik, C. Richard Hagen, and Tom Kibble (GHK). They are credited with the theory of the Higgs mechanism and the prediction of the Higgs field and Higgs boson. Together, these provide a theoretical means by which Goldstone's theorem can be avoided. They show how gauge bosons can acquire non-zero masses as a result of spontaneous symmetry breaking within gauge invariant models of the universe.
The goldstino is the Nambu−Goldstone fermion emerging in the spontaneous breaking of supersymmetry. It is the close fermionic analog of the Nambu−Goldstone bosons controlling the spontaneous breakdown of ordinary bosonic symmetries.
Yasunori Nomura is a theoretical physicist working on particle physics, quantum gravity, and cosmology. He is a professor of physics at University of California, Berkeley, a senior faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and a principal investigator at Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe. Since 2015, he has been the director of the Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics.
Edward Farhi is physicist working on quantum computation as a Principal Scientist at Google. In 2018 he retired from his position as the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was the Director of the Center for Theoretical Physics at MIT from 2004 until 2016. He made contributions to particle physics, general relativity and astroparticle physics before turning to his current interest, quantum computation.
In the terminology of quantum field theory, a ghost, ghost field, ghost particle, or gauge ghost is an unphysical state in a gauge theory. Ghosts are necessary to keep gauge invariance in theories where the local fields exceed a number of physical degrees of freedom.