Frank Wilczek 2004 Nobel Prize

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Frank Wilczek 2004 Nobel Prize

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Frank Wilczek is considered one of the world's most eminent theoretical physicists. He shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics with David J. Gross and H. David Politzer for the discovery of asymptotic freedom, a theoretical finding concerning the behavior of subatomic particles called quarks. In 1973, Wilczek and his colleagues made an important discovery concerning the strong force, the force that binds together the particles inside atomic nuclei. Also known as the "color" force, it manipulates quarks, the tiny particles that make up protons and neutrons. The scientists found that the closer the quarks are to each other, the weaker the color force between them. This allows quarks very near each other to behave like free particles. Oppositely, as the distance between two quarks increases, the color force becomes stronger - much like how the tension along a rubber band increases the more it is stretched.This discovery led to a new physics theory, Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). QCD became an important part of the Standard Model, the theory that describes how all forces that exist between particles - electromagnetism, the weak force, and the strong force - are connected. Armed with this new QCD theory, physicists were finally able to explain why quarks behave like free particles at very high energies, yet are bound in groups of two or three inside protons and neutrons. Another direct result of QCD is Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), which smashes gold nuclei together to learn about the forces and particles within. The major goal of the RHIC program is to create and study "quark-gluon plasma," the extremely hot, dense state of matter believed to have existed fractions of a second after the Big Bang. The possibility of such a state, in which quarks are not confined within protons and neutrons, is a prediction of the QCD theory. Wilczek has received UNESCO's Dirac Medal, the American Physical Society's Sakurai Prize, the Michelson Prize from Case Western

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January 24th, 2017

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