Julius Wess Award 2014
The KIT Center for Elementary Particle and Astroparticle Physics (KCETA) of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) awarded the Julius Wess Prize 2014 to Professor Dr. Arkady Vainshtein, a Russian-born theoretical physicist who holds the Gloria Lubkin Professorship at the University of Minnesota. Arkady Vainshtein received the prize as one of the most influential theoretical particle physicists of the second half of the twentieth century. After the award ceremony he gave a very interesting lecture on his scientific work on quantum field theory
Vainshtein, born in 1942, attended the University of Novosibirsk and the Budker Institute for Nuclear Physics in Novosibirsk, where he graduated in 1964 and received his Russian doctorate in 1968 (equivalent to a habilitation in the West). He remained as a scientist at the Budker Institute, where he worked with Valentin Zakharov and Mikhail Shifman from the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP) in Moscow in the 1970s and 1980s. From 1990 he became Shifman Professor at the University of Minnesota, in 1998 he became a US citizen. He has been a Fellow of the American Physical Society since 1997.
Vainshtein is best known for his work with Zakharov and Shifman on non-disturbance theoretical aspects of quantum chromodynamics (QCD), for example for the QCD sum rules named after them. Later he also researched non-leptonic weak decays and supersymmetric nonabolic gauge theories. He also studied QCD contributions to the calculation of precision measurements in quantum electrodynamics such as the abnormal magnetic moment of the muon.
In 1999 he received the Sakurai Prize together with Zakharov and Shifman. In 2005 he received the Pomerantschuk Prize of the ITEP.
The Julius Wess Prize commemorates Professor Dr. Julius Wess, who during his twenty years at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology has worked tirelessly for theoretical and experimental elementary particle physics and during this time has published works of outstanding international significance. Field-theoretical terms such as the Wess-Zumino effect or the formulation of the first supersymmetric quantum field theory, the Wess-Zumino model, will always remain associated with its name. The research prize is awarded to elementary particle or astroparticle physicists for outstanding experimental or theoretical scientific achievements that broaden and deepen our understanding of the fundamental laws of nature.