Quantum field theory

Interview with Blas Cabrera, Stanley Wojcicki Chair Professor of Physics at Stanford. Cabrera recounts his family’s Spanish heritage, he discusses being a third-generation physicist, and he explains the circumstances of his family’s arrival to the United States when he was five. He describes his childhood in Charlottesville, where his father taught at the University of Virginia’s Department of Physics. Cabrera describes his own undergraduate experience at UVA and the opportunities that led to his graduate admission at Stanford to work with Bill Fairbank. He discusses his research on relativistic corrections to the Cooper mass pairs and on developing low magnetic fields. Cabrera conveys the influence of Shelly Glashow’s ideas about the possibility that dark matter is magnetically charged particles, and he describes his postdoctoral work on the GP-B project. Cabrera describes the Valentine’s Day event in 1982 where there was initial excitement that he had detected a magnetic monopole, and he explains his subsequent focus on WIMPs and the broader search for dark matter. He describes his work on the international CDMS collaboration, he explains the transition from CDMS I to CDMS II, and he reviews how the project understands its goals in light of the ongoing mystery of dark matter. Cabrera discusses his tenure as department chair at Stanford and as director of the Hansen Experimental Physics Laboratory. At the end of interview, Cabrera reflects on accepting that he did not detect a magnetic monopole, and he surveys the accomplishments and future prospects of CDMS.

In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Thomas Appelquist, Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics at Yale University. Appelquist recounts his upbringing in rural Iowa and then Indiana, where he attended Catholic high school. He describes his undergraduate experience at Illinois Benedictine College and explains his attraction to attend a small school for college. Appelquist discusses his decision to attend Cornell for his PhD, and recalls that, relative to others in his cohort who went to larger schools, he had the most catching up to do in quantum mechanics. He explains the development of his thesis topic under the direction of Don Yennie, which focused on aspects of renormalization theory using the Feynman parametric approach. Appelquist contextualizes some of the broader questions in quantum field theory and quantum electrodynamics at this time, and he describes the opportunities that led him to SLAC for his postdoctoral research. He describes his interests there as focused on theories of the weak interactions, and he describes his initial faculty appointment at Harvard where he joined the particle theory group led by Shelly Glashow and Sidney Coleman. Appelquist discusses his close collaboration with Helen Quinn on how to renormalize Yang-Mills theories, and he explains his decision to take a tenured position at Yale in consideration of the culture at Harvard, where the prospects of tenure were minimal. He describes the revolutionary discoveries of asymptotic freedom, QCD, and the “November Revolution” at SLAC and Brookhaven at the time. Appelquist describes his research and administrative activities to advance the particle theory group at Yale, and his overall efforts to improve the department as chair and in particular building up the condensed matter theory group. He discusses his tenure as Dean of the Graduate School and his long-term involvement with the Aspen Center. At the end of the interview, Appelquist describes his current interests in lattice gauge theory and explains why he expects that physics will see double beta decay in the next generation of experiments.

Interview with Arthur Jaffe, the Landon Clay Professor of Mathematics and Theoretical Science at Harvard University. Jaffe discusses his childhood in New York, where his father was a physician. He shares memories of life during World War II and his affinity for building model airplanes and radios. Jaffe recalls the factors that led him to pursue his undergraduate degree at Princeton, where he began as a chemistry major but switched to physics. He recounts how he learned about the work of Arthur Wightman, leading him to continue at Princeton for his graduate studies. Jaffe describes his work on bosonic field theories and his time at a summer program in Montenegro. He discusses his move to Stanford and his work in the theory group at SLAC under Sidney Drell. Jaffe recalls the beginnings of his collaboration with James Glimm, as well as his move to Harvard. He explains his role in forming the Clay Mathematics Institute at Harvard and discusses his involvement in the International Association of Mathematical Physics and the American Mathematical Society. Jaffe shares his take on topics such as superstring theory, supersymmetry, and the four-dimensional problem, and reflects more broadly on changes he has seen in the field of mathematics over the years. 

The interviewee has not given permission for this interview to be shared at this time. Transcripts will be updated as they become available to the public. For any questions about this policy, please contact [email protected].

In this interview, Oscar Wallace (Wally) Greenberg recalls his experiences growing up in New Jersey as the child of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and his accelerated education at Rutgers University and Princeton University, where his advisor was Arthur Wightman. He discusses his dissertation called “The Asymptotic Condition in Quantum Field Theory,” postdocs at Brandeis with S. S. Schweber and at MIT with Francis Low, and early work on high-energy limits and the general structure of quantum field theory. He reflects on his landmark proposal that quarks have a three-valued charge, later called color, as well as the delayed acceptance of the idea, his prediction of later measurements of the excited states of baryons, and his propensity not to promote his contributions. Greenberg also discusses his acceptance of a position at the University of Maryland, where he would spend most of his career, as well as visiting appointments elsewhere, and he offers anecdotes about his interactions with J. Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Study. The interview concludes with discussions of what remains unknown in particle physics and of cosmology as a “laboratory” with particle energies not available on Earth. A technical addendum to the interview lists 24 of Greenberg’s key contributions to physics.

The interviewee has not given permission for this interview to be shared at this time. Transcripts will be updated as they become available to the public. For any questions about this policy, please contact [email protected].

Interview with David Gross, Chancellor’s Chair Professor of Physics at University of California in Santa Barbara and a permanent member of the Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics (KITP). Gross begins by describing his childhood in Arlington, Virginia and his family’s later move to Israel. This led to his decision to enroll at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for his undergraduate studies in physics and mathematics. Gross recalls his acceptance at Berkeley for his graduate studies, where Geoffrey Chew became his advisor. He explains his early interests in strong interactions, quantum field theory, and S-matrix theory. Gross then describes taking a fellowship at Harvard after completing his PhD, where he recalls his early involvement in string theory. He speaks about his subsequent move to join the faculty at Princeton, as well as his introduction to Frank Wilczek, one of his first graduate students with whom he later shared the Nobel Prize. Gross takes us through the discovery of asymptotic freedom, the development of quantum chromodynamics, and the impact these had on the Standard Model. He discusses his decision to leave Princeton for UCSB, where he focused on growing the KITP and securing funding. Gross describes how his research interests have shifted over the years across topics such as confinement, quantum gravity, and more recently back to string theory. Toward the end of the interview, Gross speaks about his work to develop institutes similar to KITP in other countries, as well as his term as President of the American Physical Society in 2019.

Interview with Marc Kamionkowski, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University. He discusses his family heritage of Ashkenazi Jews who left Eastern Europe for Argentina, and his father’s medical research which took the family to Cleveland. Kamionkowski recounts his childhood in Shaker Heights, and he describes his undergraduate work at Washington University, where he switched from pre-med to physics to work with Marty Israel and Joe Klarmann. Despite his lack of preparation, Kamionkowski explains his admission to the University of Chicago, and he describes “the bug” that made him focus on physics and drive to succeed in quantum mechanics and understand quantum field theory. He discusses his thesis research under the direction of Michael Turner on energetic neutrinos from WIMP annihilation in the sun. Kamionkowski discusses his post-doctoral research at the Institute for Advanced Study where he was in Frank Wilczek’s particle theory group. He describes his first faculty appointment at Columbia and how experimental advances had opened up opportunities in cosmology. He explains his decision to move to Caltech because of its strength in theoretical astrophysics and where he became director of the Moore Center. Kamionkowski discusses his subsequent move to Johns Hopkins, and he surveys his recent projects on the Hubble Tension and early dark energy. At the end of the interview, Kamionkowski explains why he has always valued research that bridges the divide between theory and experimentation and why he expects this will continue to inform his broad research agenda.

In this interview, David Zierler, Oral Historian for AIP, interviews Laurence Yaffe, chair of the department of physics at the University of Washington. Yaffe recounts his childhood in northern California and his early interests in science and the influence of his mother, who was a chemist. He discusses his undergraduate experience at Caltech, where he became absorbed in physics even as he continued in his major in chemistry. Yaffe explains his graduate offer from John Wheeler to pursue a Ph.D. in physics at Princeton. He describes the intellectual benefits of going back and forth between the Institute and the department, and he discusses his relationship with his graduate advisor, David Gross. Yaffe explains why he believes string theory should continue to be pursued, particularly in light of developments related to AdS/CFT duality. He describes his decision to return to Caltech for his postdoctoral research, and he recounts his considerations with competing faculty offers from Caltech and Princeton. Yaffe discusses his early faculty career at Princeton and his work on quark and lepton masses and the large-N limit of QCD or Yang-Mills theory. He describes the events leading to his decision to join the faculty at UW and his ongoing interests in QCD. Yaffe explains the evolution of quantum field theory over the course of his career, and he describes how advances in computers have revolutionized theory. He discusses some of the challenges inherent in the current state of the field, and he discusses his advisory work for the Department of Energy. At the end of the interview, Yaffe reflects on the overall and historic excellence of the department of physics at UW, and he explains why he will remain interested in quantum entanglement for the foreseeable future.

Interview with Toichiro Kinoshita, a Japanese-born physicist who is best known for pioneering the value of muon g-2, the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon. Kinoshita describes his education—Daiichi High School, Tokyo University—how he avoided military service during World War II, and meeting and marrying his wife, Masako Matsuoka. He describes his introduction to quantum electrodynamics and renormalization through papers by Dyson and Feynman. His early research also involved work on the C-meson theory developed by Sakata. After the war, Kinoshita came to the United States to the Institute for Advanced Study, then as a postdoc at Columbia in 1954. In 1955 Kinoshita moved to Cornell. He became particularly interested in making calculations to test the theory of quantum electrodynamics. He describes his introduction to computers at Princeton, using von Neumann’s computer. The interview covers how he became interested in calculating g-2 at CERN in 1966, and his subsequent efforts, the first being the sixth order calculation, where the light-by-light diagram enters for the first time. He describes his efforts doing the eighth order calculation, and his collaboration with Makiko Nio, as well as his calculations of the tenth order. Physicists whom he describes more than briefly include Kodaira, Tomonaga, Nambu, and Nio. Near the end, Kinoshita describes the importance of g-2 experiments, and his recent work.