Discovery of asymptotic freedom and the 2004 Nobel Prize
ID: discovery-of-asymptotic-freedom-and-the-2004-nobel-prize
David Gross and Frank Wilczek, and independently H. David Politzer, published their one-loop order Non-Abelian gauge theory results in adjacent 1973 Physical Review Letters papers. Both established a high-energy route to weak coupling; extrapolating into the low-energy region was a separate dynamical problem.[ref]
Ultraviolet Behavior of Non-Abelian Gauge Theories by David J. Gross and Frank Wilczek. 1973, p. 1345, acknowledgment of the independent calculation
[ref]Reliable Perturbative Results for Strong Interactions? by Hugh David Politzer. 1973, p. 1348, low-energy hypotheses versus the asymptotic result
The three shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction. David Gross's Nobel lecture describes the unexpected sign and their comparison of independent calculations.[ref]
The discovery of asymptotic freedom and the emergence of QCD by David J. Gross. 2005 reprint, p. 837, award footnote; p. 843, discovery narrative
In his lecture The Dilemma of Attribution, H. David Politzer emphasizes that the prize marks a wider community's work and that a tidy prize-centered history hides how discovery actually proceeds.[ref] New to topics? Read the docs here!