Asymptotic freedom and quantum chromodynamics (QCD)
Libertad asintótica y cromodinámica cuántica
- Date
- 1973 · confidence high
- Place
- Princeton University, New Jersey / Harvard, Massachusetts, United States
- Credited to
- David Gross; Frank Wilczek; David Politzer; Murray Gell-Mann; Harald Fritzsch
- People
- 👤 David Gross1941–👤 David Politzer1949–👤 Frank Wilczek1951–👤 Harald Fritzsch1943–2022👤 Murray Gell-Mann1929–2019
- Field
- Cosmos & Earth
What was discovered
In a Yang-Mills theory with colour, the interaction weakens at short distances and becomes overwhelming at long ones, which explains both deep inelastic scattering and quark confinement. It establishes QCD as the theory of the strong force.
Gross-Wilczek and Politzer published in the same issue of Physical Review Letters; 't Hooft had obtained the result in 1972 without publishing it. 2004 Nobel Prize.
What it led to
- Complete standard model
- Lattice QCD and the mass of the proton
- Quark-gluon plasma
- Discovery of the gluon (1979)
Built on
- Non-abelian gauge theories (Yang-Mills)1954
- Experimental evidence for quarks (deep inelastic scattering)1968-1969
- Renormalization group and critical phenomena1971-1972
- Yang-Mills theories
- Quark model and colour charge (Han-Nambu, Greenberg)
Made possible
- The gluon1979
- Exotic hadrons: tetraquarks and pentaquarks2015
- Calculation of hadronic processes at the LHC