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In retrospect

Nobel 2004: freedom for quarks!

Nature Reviews Physics volume 6, page 581 (2024)Cite this article

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Suddenly there were particles everywhere. After a slow start from the late 1800s (first the electron, the proton, then later the neutron, the positron), by the early 1960s a whole host of particles had been discovered: the muon, pions, kaons; the antiproton; lambda, omega and xi baryons. Three forces were in play — electromagnetic, weak and strong — but experiments were streaking far ahead of a theory that could explain their results. After the heady excitement in the late 1940s of the formulation of quantum electrodynamics (QED) — a renormalizable quantum field theory for the electromagnetic interaction — particle theory was sputtering to a halt. Nobel laureate David Gross remembered the early 1960s as “a period of experimental supremacy and theoretical impotence…There was hardly any theory to speak of.”

But that was about to change. In fact, by the late 1960s, several fragments of the theory that would shortly be cemented as the standard model of particle physics already existed, or were being published to little notice. And by 1973, the pieces of the puzzle were fitting together: one of those pieces was “the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction” for which Gross, Frank Wilczek and David Politzer shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics.

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References

Original articles

  • Gross, D. J. & Wilczek, F. Ultraviolet behavior of non-Abelian gauge theories. Phys. Rev. Lett. 30, 1343–1346 (1973)

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  • Politzer, H. D. Reliable perturbative results for strong interactions? Phys. Rev. Lett. 30, 1346–1349 (1973)

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Related article

  • Gross, D. J. Twenty-five years of asymptotic freedom. Nucl. Phys. B Proc. Suppl. 74, 426–446 (1999)

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  1. Nature Reviews Physics https://www.nature.com/natrevphys/

    Alison Wright

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  1. Alison Wright
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Correspondence to Alison Wright.

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Wright, A. Nobel 2004: freedom for quarks!. Nat Rev Phys 6, 581 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42254-024-00768-3

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