Faculty

FRANK WILCZEK
Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics
2004 Nobel Laureate

Name: Frank Wilczek Title(s): Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics 2004 Nobel Laureate Email: wilczek@mit.edu Phone: (617) 253-0284 Assistant: Joyce Berggren (617) 253-4827 Address: MIT Center for Theoretical Physics 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Bldg. 6-301 Cambridge, MA 02139 Related Links: Frank Wilczek's Home Page MIT Center for Theoretical Physics

Area of Physics:

Particle/Quantum Physics

Education:

• B.Sc. 1970, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
• M.Sc. 1972, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
• Ph.D. 1974, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

Selected Awards and Honors:

• American Academy of Arts and Sciences Member
• American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow
• American Philosophical Society Member
• American Physical Society Fellow
• American Physical Society Prize
• American Physical Society Prize
• Dirac Medal
• National Academy of Sciences Member
• Nobel Prize (2004)

Research Interests

Professor Wilczek's professional work has touched on a large variety of questions in theoretical physics. Abiding interests include:

• "pure" particle physics, especially connections between ambitious theoretical ideas and concrete observable phenomena (e.g. applications of asymptotic freedom, unification of couplings);
• the behavior of matter at ultra-high temperature and/or density (e.g. phase structure of QCD, application to cosmology, neutron stars and stellar explosions);
• the application of insights from particle physics to cosmology (e.g. axions as dark matter candidates, search techniques for these and for WIMPs);
• the application of field theory techniquesto condensed matter physics (e.g. exotic quantum numbers on solitons of various sorts, statistical transmutation and fractional statistics in the quantum Hall effect);
• the quantum theory of black holes (e.g. existence of quantum hair, classical hair and entropy of string-theoretic holes).

Biographical Sketch

Professor Frank Wilczek is considered one of the world's most eminent theoretical physicists. He is known, among other things, for the discovery of asymptotic freedom, the development of quantum chromodynamics, the invention of axions, and the discovery and exploitation of new forms of quantum statistics (anyons). When only 21 years old and a graduate student at Princeton University, in work with David Gross he defined the properties of color gluons, which hold atomic nuclei together.

Professor Wilczek received his B.S. degree from the University of Chicago and his Ph.D. from Princeton University. He taught at Princeton from 1974–81. During the period 1981–88, he was the Chancellor Robert Huttenback Professor of Physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the first permanent member of the National Science Foundation's Institute for Theoretical Physics. In the fall of 2000, he moved from the Institute for Advanced Study, where he was the J.R. Oppenheimer Professor, to the MIT Department of Physics, where he is the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics. Since 2002, he has been an Adjunct Professor in the Centro de Estudios Científicos of Valdivia, Chile.

Professor Wilczek has been a Sloan Foundation Fellow (1975-77) and a MacArthur Foundation Fellow (1982-87). He has received UNESCO's Dirac Medal, the American Physical Society's Sakurai Prize, the Michelson Prize from Case Western University, and the Lorentz Medal of the Netherlands Academy for his contributions to the development of theoretical physics. In 2004 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics, and in 2005 the King Faisal Prize. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Netherlands Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a Trustee of the University of Chicago. He contributes regularly to Physics Today and to Nature, explaining topics at the frontiers of physics to wider scientific audiences. He received the Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society for these activities. Two of his pieces have been anthologized in Best American Science Writing (2003, 2005). Together with his wife Betsy Devine, he wrote a beautiful book, Longing for the Harmonies (W.W. Norton).

Selected Publications

Here is a brief informal description of the papers you can access in PDF format.

• Quark Description of Hadronic Phases: A first cut at applying the lessons learned from color-flavor locking and quark-hadron continuity to real QCD, which is complicated by splitting between strange and light quarks. Both classic 2-flavor color superconductivity (with the strange quark passive) and color-flavor locking are valid groundstates in different parameter regimes at high density. An extremely intriguing possibility is that the 2-flavor color superconducting phase goes over into ordinary nuclear matter with no phase transition. This might qualitatively explain the small nuclear (compared to QCD) mass scale; it requires chiral symmetry restoration -- which could explain the long-standing observation $g_A \rightarrow 1$ in nuclear matter.
• Continuity of Quark and Hadron Matter: In this work the full power of color-flavor locking became apparent. It gives us an analytically tractable realization of confinement and chiral symmetry breaking in a regime of definite physical interest. We find a detailed match between the calculable properties of the high-density (quark) phase and the properties of the low-density (nuclear) phase one has learned to expect from phenomenology, numerics, etc.
• High Density Quark Matter and the Renormalization Group in QCD with Two and Three Flavors: Showing how the renormalization of Fermi liquid parameters in QCD is surprisingly tractable, and identifying the favored couplings.
• Color-Flavor Locking and Chiral Symmetry Breaking in High Density QCD: Proposing a fascinating candidate phase for hadronic matter at high density. Among other things, the elementary excitations are all integrally charged!
• Fermion Masses, Neutrino Oscillations, and Proton Decay in the Light of SuperKamiokande: A serious attempt to decode the message of the SuperKamiokande neutrino oscillation discovery using all the resources of supersymmetric grand unified theories. An attractive, overconstrained model of fermion (quark, charged lepton, and neutrino) masses, based on SO(10) with an economical Higgs content, is presented. A major conclusion is that proton decay at observable levels is hard to avoid.
• Quantum Field Theory: My attempt to locate quantum field theory in the intellectual landscape. Written for the APS Centennial Volume.
• Riemann-Einstein Structure from Volume and Gauge Symmetry: A sort of inverse to the Kaluza-Klein construction, realizing gravity as a spontaneously broken gauge theory.
• A Chern-Simons Effective Field Theory for the Pfaffian Quantum Hall State: A simplified representation of the quantum Hall States exhibiting non-abelian statistics.
• The Cosmic Asymmetry Between Matter and Antimatter

  Last updated: 04.04.2013

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