Ernst Stueckelberg

:"This article is about the physicist; for his grandfather, the Swiss artist, see Ernst Alfred Stueckelberg"

Ernst Carl Gerlach Stueckelberg (February 1, 1905, Basel - September 4, 1984, Basel) was a Swiss mathematician and physicist.

In 1926 Stueckelberg got his Ph. D. at Munich under Arnold Sommerfeld. He qualified as a university lecturer together with Konrad Bleuler under supervision from Gregor Wentzel at the University of Zürich.

In 1934 he devised a fully covariant [http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/9903023 perturbation theory for quantum fields] . To quote this paper, "The approach proposed by Stueckelberg was far more powerful, but was not adopted by others at the time". Now, despite its benefits, this approach has been all but forgotten. However, besides being explicitly covariant, Stueckelberg's methods avoid vacuum bubbles. See also [http://www.cgoakley.demon.co.uk/qft/ here] .

Independently from Hideki Yukawa, he gave vector boson exchange as the theoretical explanation of the strong nuclear force in 1935.

In 1938 he recognized that massive electrodynamics contains a hidden scalar, and formulated an affine version of what would become known as the Abelian Higgs mechanism.

The evolution parameter theory he presented in 1941 and 1942 is the basis for recent work in Relativistic dynamics.

In 1942 he proposed the interpretation of the positron as a negative energy electron traveling backward in time.

In 1943 he came up with a renormalization program to attack the problems of infinities in quantum electrodynamics (QED), but his paper was rejected by the Physical Review.

In 1953 he and Andre Peterman discovered the renormalization group.

In 1976 he was awarded the Max Planck medal.

Although his work was mostly well respected, later work that was only superficially different and only marginally more advanced would win the Nobel prize for others.

ee also

* Timeline of quantum mechanics, molecular physics, atomic physics, nuclear physics, and particle physics
* Propagator
* Relativistic dynamics
* Stueckelberg action
* Stueckelberg-Feynman interpretation

External links

* Jan Lacki, "The Road to Stueckelberg's Covariant Perturbation Theory as Illustrated by Successive Treatments of Compton Scattering", [http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/9903023 physics/9903023]

* Francesco Cianfrani, Orchidea Maria Lecian, "E.C.G. Stueckelberg: a forerunner of modern physics" [http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0701340 physics/0701340]
* http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/ecgstcklbrg.html