Martinus Veltman, the Electroweak Theory,
and Elementary Particle Physics
Courtesy
University of
Michigan
· Resources with Additional Information
Martinus J.G. Veltman, the John D. MacArthur Professor Emeritus of Physics
at the University of Michigan, was awarded the 1999
Nobel Prize in physics "for elucidating
the quantum structure of electroweak interactions in physics".
‘Veltman shares [the] Nobel Prize in physics with his former graduate
student, Gerardus ‘t Hooft, who is now a professor of physics at the
University of Utrecht. They received the prize for work done in the 1960s and
1970s that made it possible for physicists to mathematically predict properties
of the sub-atomic particles that make up all matter in the universe and the
forces that hold these particles together.
Veltman's work was vital to the 1995 discovery of the top quark, which was
observed for the first time during experiments conducted at the FermiLab particle
accelerator near Chicago, Ill. Physics Prof. Homer A. Neal was one of several
U-M faculty members who participated in experiments at FermiLab that confirmed
the existence of the top quark.
"Without Veltman's and ‘t Hooft's work, discovery of the top quark
would have been impossible," Neal said. "While the concepts behind
the Standard Model—the theory that describes the elementary particles
and forces in the universe—were well-known in the physics community,
their work gave us a way to apply the theory to real-world events. It was of
monumental importance to advances of modern physics.
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Additional information about Martinus J.G. Veltman and his research is
available in full-text and on the Web.
Documents:
Divergence
Conditions and Sum Rules; Physical Review Letters, Vol.
17, Issue 10: 553–556, September
1966
Some Comments on the Decays of eta (550); DOE
Technical Report, July 1996; Physical
Review, Vol. 154, Issue 5: 1469–1474, February 1967
Perturbation
Theory of Massive Yang–Mills Fields, DOE
Technical Report, August 1968
Nobel
Lecture: From Weak Interactions to Gravitation; Review of
Modern Physics, Vol. 72, Issue 2: 341–349, April 2000
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