2002 Pomeranchuk winners announced
The Pomeranchuk Prize for 2002 is awarded to Ludvig Dmitrievich Faddeev of the Steklov Mathematical Institute in St Petersburg, Russia, and to Bryce DeWitt of the University of Texas, Austin, US, for the discovery and development of quantization methods in gauge theories, which laid the foundation for understanding the quantum dynamics of gauge fields.
Professor Faddeev is director of the Euler International Mathematical Institute. He is a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) and the head of the Division of Mathematical Sciences of the RAS. Among his most famous theoretical research achievements is the development (in collaboration with Victor N Popov and independently DeWitt) of the method for quantization of non-Abelian gauge theories. Faddeev also found the complete solution of the quantum three-body problem and since that time "Faddeev's equations" have become nuclear physics folklore. Together with Vladimir E Zakharov he developed an extremely useful Hamiltonian approach to the theory of solitons and put forward the soliton quantization. With Evgueni K Sklyanin and Leon A Takhtajan, Faddeev developed the quantum inverse scattering method, which constitutes one of the approaches to modern quantum group theory. He is the author of several books and monographs, and was awarded the Heineman Prize for mathematical physics by the American Physical Society in 1974, and the ICTP Dirac medal in 1991.
Professor Emeritus Bryce S DeWitt's outstanding achievement is the extension of the methods of quantum theory to non-Abelian gauge fields including quantum gravity. He created an approach to quantum field theory, which consistently combined this theory with geometry and thus became a basis of the modern development. He is also credited with a covariant renormalization theory, which in a more general setting is known as the Schwinger-DeWitt technique. The so-called Wheeler-DeWitt equation constitutes the basis of quantum cosmology. DeWitt is a pioneer of numerical methods in general relativity. His work on the radiation of gravitationally accelerated charge had a prominent impact on the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. He is the author of several books and important review articles. His latest monograph The Global Approach to Quantum Field Theory sums up a whole epoch in this area of theoretical physics. DeWitt received the ICTP Dirac medal in 1987.
Nominations for the Pomeranchuk Prize 2003 should be sent to pomeron@heron.itep.ru no later than 1 February 2003. Further information is available at http://face.itep.ru/pomeranchuk.html.
EPS rewards communicators of physics
The European Physical Society (EPS) has awarded its annual prize for the public understanding of physics to Rafel Carreras. With his unique gift for communicating science, Carreras enthralled public audiences at CERN for decades until his retirement in 1998. His lectures - presented under the banners of "Science for All" and "The Sciences of Today" - touched on all aspects of science, and were delivered with clarity, understanding and an infectious enthusiasm.
Carreras is also the author of the popular CERN publication, When Energy Becomes Matter. He combines his gift for communication with a genuine and unassuming modesty. In accepting the prize, he traced his enthusiasm for science popularization back to his childhood. "As a schoolboy, I often found it difficult to understand what my classmates understood easily," he explained, "so when I understood something I was so happy that I wanted to share my recently acquired knowledge with everybody I met!"
At the same time, the society's high-energy physics board awarded its annual outreach prize to Michael Kobel of Bonn University, Germany, for his efforts in bringing high-energy physics into the classroom. Kobel has worked directly with educators in Germany to introduce high-energy physics into the school curriculum, both through the creation of new materials and the imaginative use of concepts developed in other European countries. He is a member of the ECFA European particle physics outreach group, and coordinator for German involvement in the "Physics on Stage" teachers' programme.
French town hosts ATLAS overview meeting
The ATLAS collaboration, which is building a detector for CERN's Large Hadron Collider, held an overview week away from CERN in June. Following similar gatherings at Dubna in Russia two years ago and at Brookhaven in the US last year, the French town of Clermont-Ferrand welcomed collaboration members to the Journées ATLAS 2002.
During the welcome ceremony at the Clermont-Ferrand town hall, Mayor Serge Godard awarded medals of the city to members of the ATLAS management, while the Blaise Pascal University presented ATLAS members with a text written by Blaise Pascal, who was born at Clermont in 1623, printed on hand-crafted paper.