50 Years of Yang-Mills Theory


Book Description

On the 50th anniversary of YangOCoMills theory, this invaluable volume looks back at the developments and achievements in elementary particle physics that ensued from that beautiful idea. During the last five decades, Yang-Mills theory, which is undeniably the most important cornerstone of theoretical physics, has expanded widely. It has been investigated from many perspectives, and many new and unexpected features have been uncovered from this theory. In recent decades, apart from high energy physics, the theory has been actively applied in other branches of physics, such as statistical physics, condensed matter physics, nonlinear systems, etc. This makes the theory an indispensable topic for all who are involved in physics. An international team of experts, each of whom has left his mark on the developments of this remarkable theory, contribute essays or more detailed technical accounts to this volume. These articles highlight the new discoveries from the respective authorsOCO perspectives. The distinguished contributors are: S Adler, F A Bais, C Becchi, M Creutz, A De Rjula, B S DeWitt, F Englert, L D Faddeev, P Hasenfratz, R Jackiw, A Polyakov, V N Popov, R Stora, P van Baal, P van Nieuwenhuizen, S Weinberg, F Wilczek, E Witten, C N Yang. Included in each article are introductory and explanatory remarks by the editor, G OCOt Hooft, who is himself a major player in the development of Yang-Mills theory."




50 Years of Yang-Mills Theory


Book Description

The Roman Catholic faith has inspired some of the world's greatest creative works and has been a powerful force in history from the Roman Empire to the present. Catholic writers reflect their heritage in their works, and generations of readers have continued to appreciate the Catholic literary tradition. Many works by Catholic writers hold a high place in the literary canon and have exerted a tremendous cultural and political influence. Still others continue to be widely read by contemporary readers and quietly shape modern society. Some works, too, reflect the conflicts of the Catholic Church in the 21st century and capture the struggles of individual Catholics in a secular society. This encyclopedia covers the vast riches of the Catholic literary tradition from its origins to the present day. Included are substantial entries on more than 70 major works from around the world. A special effort has been made to cover women writers and writers of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds, whose works reflect the many dimensions of the Catholic experience. The encyclopedia provides entries on such writers and works as St. Augustine's Confessions, Catherine of Siena's Dialogue, Dante's The Divine Comedy, Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street, J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, and Muriel Spark's Memento Mori. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and includes a biography of the writer, a plot summary of a major work, an extended critical discussion, an overview of the work's critical reception, and a selected bibliography. The entries give detailed attention to particular works and explore their relation to Catholic thought. The encyclopedia concludes with a selected, general bibliography.




60 Years Of Yang-mills Gauge Field Theories: C N Yang's Contributions To Physics


Book Description

During the last six decades, Yang-Mills theory has increasingly become the cornerstone of theoretical physics. It is seemingly the only fully consistent relativistic quantum many-body theory in four space-time dimensions. As such it is the underlying theoretical framework for the Standard Model of Particle Physics, which has been shown to be the correct theory at the energies we now can measure. It has been investigated also from many other perspectives, and many new and unexpected features have been uncovered from this theory. In recent decades, apart from high energy physics, the theory has been actively applied in other branches of physics, such as statistical physics, condensed matter physics, nonlinear systems, etc. This makes the theory an indispensable topic for all who are involved in physics.The conference celebrated the exceptional achievements using Yang-Mills theory over the years but also many other truly remarkable contributions to different branches of physics from Prof C N Yang. This volume collects the invaluable talks by Prof C N Yang and the invited speakers reviewing these remarkable contributions and their importance for the future of physics.




Frank Wilczek: 50 Years Of Theoretical Physics


Book Description

Frank Wilczek is one of the foremost theoretical physicists of the past half-century. He has made several fundamental contributions that shape our understanding of high energy physics, cosmology, condensed matter physics, and statistical physics. In all these fields his many discoveries continue to play a key role in shaping the direction of modern theoretical physics.Among Wilczek's major achievements is the discovery of asymptotic freedom, which predicts and explains the ultraviolet behavior of non-abelian gauge theories. The axion, which he co-discovered and named, has emerged as the prevalent candidate for explaining the origin of dark matter in the Universe. His invention of color-flavor locking explains chiral symmetry breaking in high density quantum chromodynamics. His introduction of fractional statistics and anyons are pivotal to our understanding of the fractional quantum Hall effect and form the building blocks of topological quantum computing. His invention of the time crystal concept has catalyzed extensive investigations of dynamical phases of physical systems.Frank Wilczek received the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of asymptotic freedom. He is also the recipient of several Prizes and honorary awards including the MacArthur Fellowship, the Lorentz Medal of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society, the High Energy and Particle Physics Prize of the European Physical Society, and the King Faisal International Prize for Science of the King Faisal Foundation. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. He is also a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Sweden.He is currently the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at MIT Center for Theoretical Physics. He also holds a professorship at Stockholm University, is a Distinguished Professor at Arizona State University, and is the founding director of the Tsung-Dao Lee Institute and Chief Scientist of the Wilczek Quantum Center at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.This volume serves as a tribute to Frank Wilczek's legendary scientific contributions, commemorating his 70th birthday and the first 50 years of his career as a theoretical physicist. The contributors include several of his PhD students, close collaborators, and both past and present colleagues.




The Dawning of Gauge Theory


Book Description

During the course of this century, gauge invariance has slowly emerged from being an incidental symmetry of electromagnetism to being a fundamental geometrical principle underlying the four known fundamental physical interactions. The development has been in two stages. In the first stage (1916-1956) the geometrical significance of gauge-invariance gradually came to be appreciated and the original abelian gauge-invariance of electromagnetism was generalized to non-abelian gauge invariance. In the second stage (1960-1975) it was found that, contrary to first appearances, the non-abelian gauge-theories provided exactly the framework that was needed to describe the nuclear interactions (both weak and strong) and thus provided a universal framework for describing all known fundamental interactions. In this work, Lochlainn O'Raifeartaigh describes the former phase. O'Raifeartaigh first illustrates how gravitational theory and quantum mechanics played crucial roles in the reassessment of gauge theory as a geometric principle and as a framework for describing both electromagnetism and gravitation. He then describes how the abelian electromagnetic gauge-theory was generalized to its present non-abelian form. The development is illustrated by including a selection of relevant articles, many of them appearing here for the first time in English, notably by Weyl, Schrodinger, Klein, and London in the pre-war years, and by Pauli, Shaw, Yang-Mills, and Utiyama after the war. The articles illustrate that the reassessment of gauge-theory, due in a large measure to Weyl, constituted a major philosophical as well as technical advance.




The Thermodynamics of Quantum Yang-Mills Theory


Book Description

This book aims to provide advanced students and researchers with the text on a nonperturbative, thermodynamically grounded, and largely analytical approach to four-dimensional Quantum Gauge Theory. The terrestrial, astrophysical, and cosmological applications, mostly within the realm of low-temperature photon physics, are treated.




The Thermodynamics of Quantum YangCMills Theory


Book Description

This latest edition enhances the material of the first edition with a derivation of the value of the action for each of the Harrington–Shepard calorons/anticalorons that are relevant for the emergence of the thermal ground state. Also included are discussions of the caloron center versus its periphery, the role of the thermal ground state in U(1) wave propagation, photonic particle–wave duality, and calculational intricacies and book-keeping related to one-loop scattering of massless modes in the deconfining phase of an SU(2) Yang–Mills theory. Moreover, a derivation of the temperature–redshift relation of the CMB in deconfining SU(2) Yang–Mills thermodynamics and its application to explaining an apparent early re-ionization of the Universe are given. Finally, a mechanism of mass generation for cosmic neutrinos is proposed. Contents: Theory:The Classical Yang–Mills ActionThe Perturbative Approach at Zero TemperatureAspects of Finite-Temperature Field TheorySelfdual Field ConfigurationsThe Deconfining PhaseThe Preconfining PhaseThe Confining PhaseApplications:The Approach of Thermal Lattice Gauge TheoryBlack-Body AnomalyAstrophysical and Cosmological Implications of SU(2)CMB Readership: Advanced students, postdocs and researchers in theoretical physics and mathematics, as well as experimentalists.




50 Years Of Science In Singapore


Book Description

As part of the commemorative book series on Singapore's 50 years of nation-building, this important compendium traces the history and development of the various sectors of Singapore science in the last 50 years or so. The book covers the government agencies responsible for science funding and research policy, the academic institutions and departments who have been in the forefront of the development of the nation's scientific manpower and research, the research centres and institutes which have been breaking new ground in both basic and applied science research, science museums and education, and the academic and professional institutions which the scientific community has set up to enable Singapore scientists to serve the nation more effectively.Each article is chronicled by eminent authors who have played important roles and made significant contributions in shaping today's achievement of science in Singapore.Professionals, academics, students and the general public will find this volume a useful reference material and an inspirational easy read.




100 Years of Gravity and Accelerated Frames


Book Description

This collection of papers presents ideas and problems arising over the past 100 years regarding classical and quantum gravity, gauge theories of gravity, and spacetime transformations of accelerated frames. Both Einstein's theory of gravity and the Yang-Mills theory are gauge invariant. The invariance principles in physics have transcended both kinetic and dynamic properties and are at the very heart of our understanding of the physical world. In this spirit, this book attempts to survey the development of various formulations for gravitational and Yang-Mills fields and spacetime transformations of accelerated frames, and to reveal their associated problems and limitations.The aim is to present some of the leading ideas and problems discussed by physicists and mathematicians. We highlight three aspects: formulations of gravity as a Yang-Mills field, first discussed by Utiyama; problems of gravitational theory, discussed by Feynman, Dyson and others; spacetime properties and the physics of fields and particles in accelerated frames of reference.These unfulfilled aspects of Einstein and Yang-Mills' profound thoughts present a great challenge to physicists and mathematicians in the 21st century.




50 Years Of Quarks


Book Description

'Harald Fritzsch and Murray Gell-Mann, the two fathers of quantum chromodynamics, look back at the events that led to the discovery, and eventually acceptance, of quarks as constituent particles ... it is always worthwhile to reminisce about those times when theoretical physicists were truly eclectic, these stories are the testimony of a very active era, in which theoretical and experimental discoveries rapidly chased one another ... Of central importance now is the understanding of the composition of our universe, the dark matter and dark energy, the hierarchy of masses and forces, and a consistent quantum framework of unification of all forces of nature, including gravity. The closing contributions of the book put this venture in the context of today's high-energy physics programme, and make a connection to the most popular ideas in high-energy physics today, including supersymmetry, unification and string theory.'CERN CourierToday it is known that the atomic nuclei are composed of smaller constituents, the quarks. A quark is always bound with two other quarks, forming a baryon or with an antiquark, forming a meson. The quark model was first postulated in 1964 by Murray Gell-Mann — who coined the name “quark” from James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake — and by George Zweig, who then worked at CERN. In the present theory of strong interactions — Quantum Chromodynamics proposed by H Fritzsch and Gell-Mann in 1972 — the forces that bind the quarks together are due to the exchange of eight gluons.On the 50th anniversary of the quark model, this invaluable volume looks back at the developments and achievements in the elementary particle physics that eventuated from that beautiful model. Written by an international team of distinguished physicists, each of whom have made major developments in the field, the volume provides an essential overview of the present state to the academics and researchers.