2007 Lise Meitner prize to Pierre Ramond
News: Jan 14, 2008
Professor Pierre Ramond, University of Florida, Gainesville, and Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, will receive the 2007 Lise Meitner prize from the "Fysikcentrum" of Gothenburg for his groundbreaking discoveries in theoretical physics that led to superstring theory.
Together with the prize ceremony Pierre Ramond will give this year's Lise Meitner lecture entitled "Simplicity in Natural Laws". The prize, 10 000 Swedish crowns and a sculpture from a local artist, will be awarded on January 25.
Time and place: January 25, 2008, 15.00, GD-salen, Origovägen 1, Chalmers, campus Johanneberg. The lecture, to be delivered in English, is open to everyone.
Motivation: This year the Lise Meitner prize goes to Professor Pierre Ramond, University of Florida, Gainesville, and Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, for his groundbreaking discoveries in theoretical physics that led to superstring theory.
During the years 1969-71 Ramond, who had then just completed his Ph.D. studies, was working at the National Accelerator Laboratory outside Chicago (later renamed Fermilab). Ramond and a handful of young theoretical physicists had been brought to this newly established laboratory to support experimental physicists in their work.
While there Ramond conducted independent research that laid the foundations for superstring theory. Through studying Paul Dirac's work from 1928 where he formulated the equation describing the wave function of the electron, Ramond succeeded in generalizing the idea to the quantum mechanical description of a string carrying spin.
His work made it possible to construct string theories with both bosonic and fermionic degrees of freedom, necessary for describing elementary particles associated with forces and matter respectively. A consequence of this formulation was the discovery of a new type of symmetry between these degrees of freedom, later named "Supersymmetry", which was also found to be applicable to ordinary quantum field theories describing ordinary (point-like) particles. This symmetry is now attracting enormous interest and evidence for its existence will be searched for in the new particle accelerator named the "Large Hadron Collider" (LHC) that will start operating this year at CERN.
The Lise Meitner prize is awarded by the "Fysikcentrum" of Gothenburg, comprised of the physics institutes at Göteborg University and Chalmers. The prize is given to researchers who under difficult conditions succeed in making groundbreaking discoveries in physics.
For more information: Bengt Nilsson, Mathematical Physics, tfebn@fy.chalmers.se Tel. 031 772 3160
Lise Meitner, 1878-1968, Austrian-Swedish nuclear physicist. In Berlin, 1934, she started studying the effects of bombarding Uranium with neutrons.
The experiment was conducted by the chemist Otto Hahn, and Meitner formulated the theoretical explanations of the problem. Meitner worked in Berlin until 1938 when, being born of a Jewish family, she was forced to escape and consequently came to Sweden.
Here, in Kungälv, she made history. Hahn reported the results of the experiment in Berlin. Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch explained the results.
They realized that the atomic nucleus, previously thought to be indivisible, could be split and that a large quantity of energy was emitted in the process, which we now know as "Fission". This conclusion led to a race by many laboratories when the potential for developing nuclear weapons, among other things, was realized. Lise Meitner's contributions were ignored when Otto Hahn received the 1945 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research into fission. Meitner became a Swedish citizen in 1949 and moved to Cambridge in 1960. She died there in 1968.
Source: Nationalencyklopedin.