Julius Wess

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Julius E. Wess
AwardsLeibniz Prize (1986)
Max Planck Medal (1987)
Heineman Prize (1988)
Wigner medal (1992)
Scientific career
FieldsTheoretical physics
Doctoral advisorHans Thirring
Doctoral studentsHermann Nicolai

Julius Erich Wess (5 December 1934 – 8 August 2007) was an

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, the Heineman Prize, and of several honorary doctorates
.

Life and work

Wess was born in

University of Karlsruhe. In later life, Wess was professor at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. After his retirement he worked at DESY in Hamburg
.

His doctoral students include Hermann Nicolai.

Julius Wess died at the age of 72 in Hamburg, following a stroke.[1]

His early work centered on effective field theories for hadrons, especially the interactions connecting pions and kaons with protons and neutrons. His 1969 papers with Sidney Coleman, Curtis Callan, and Zumino detailed the mathematical structure of theories with spontaneously broken symmetries. The papers laid much of the foundation for phenomenological hadron physics, but they have had even wider application. They are still being cited today.
Wess’s most highly cited work is the 1971 paper with Zumino on anomalies in effective field theories. Anomalies occur when quantum effects violate classical symmetries, giving rise to physical phenomena such as the decay of a neutral pion into two photons. Wess and Zumino showed that anomalous terms in effective Lagrangians must obey certain consistency relations. Those conditions are so important that the terms are now named after them.
Despite the fame of that early work, Wess will always be known for the 1974 papers in which he and Zumino constructed the first renormalizable supersymmetric quantum field theory in four dimensions and exhibited its nonrenormalization properties at one loop. Their work ignited an explosion of interest in supersymmetry, a concept that has come to dominate much of modern theoretical physics. His textbook on supersymmetry, with one of us (Bagger), is still a standard reference after 25 years.[2]

Publications

  • Wess, Julius; Bagger, Jonathan (1983). Supersymmetry and supergravity. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press.
    OCLC 9081798
    .
  • Wess, Julius; Bagger, Jonathan (1983). Supersymmetry and supergravity, Revised and Expanded Edition. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press. .
  • Scientific articles authored by Julius Wess recorded in INSPIRE-HEP.[3]

References

  1. ^ "Julius Wess, 72, Theoretical Physicist, Is Dead". The New York Times. 27 August 2007. Retrieved 16 December 2021.
  2. .
  3. ^ "Wess, Julius – Profile – INSPIRE-HEP". inspirehep.net. Retrieved 25 March 2020.

Further reading