Biography:Benjamin W. Lee

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Short description: Korean-born American theoretical physicist
Benjamin Whisoh Lee
Benjamin W. Lee
Born(1935-01-01)January 1, 1935
Keijō, Japanese Korea
(now Seoul, South Korea)
DiedJune 16, 1977(1977-06-16) (aged 42)
Kewanee, Illinois, U.S.
Nationality
  • South Korean (1935–1968)
  • American (1968–1977)
Alma mater
Known for
Spouse(s)Marianne Mun Ching Sim
Awards
  • Order of Camellia
  • (Order of Civil Merit of South Korea)
Scientific career
Fields
Institutions
Doctoral advisorAbraham Klein
Notable studentsBurt Ovrut
Signature
Signature of Benjamin W. Lee
Notes
Biography of Benjamin W. Lee by JooSang Kang

Benjamin Whisoh Lee (Korean: 이휘소; January 1, 1935 – June 16, 1977), or Ben Lee, was a Korean- United States theoretical physicist. His work in theoretical particle physics exerted great influence on the development of the standard model in the late 20th century, especially on the renormalization of the electro-weak model and gauge theory.

He predicted the mass of the charm quark and contributed to its search. His student Kang Joo-sang later became professor emeritus at the Department of Physics at Korea University. Lee is also the inspiration for the fictional character Lee Yong-hu in Kim Jin-myung's novel, The Rose of Sharon Blooms Again.

Biography

Lee was born in Yongsan, Seoul. Both of Lee's parents were trained as doctors, and he was the eldest of four siblings. His mother was the breadwinner of the household, and was initially employed as a doctor at a hospital. Later, she opened her own pediatrics and obstetrics/gynaecology practice.[1]

Lee demonstrated academic promise as a child and gained admission to Kyunggi Middle School. During his fourth year, the Korean War broke out and his family was forced to evacuate to the Busan Perimeter, where he continued his schooling.

Lee later enrolled in Kyunggi High School, and one year before graduating, was admitted as the top-ranked student to Seoul National University as a chemical engineering major. While in college, he was awarded a scholarship by the association of military wives whose husbands participated in the Korean War, enabling him to emigrate to the United States for undergraduate study.[1]

Lee received his B.S. summa cum laude from Miami University (1956), his M.S. from the University of Pittsburgh (1958), and his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania (1961). After conducting research at the Institute for Advanced Study, Lee went on to serve as professor of physics at the University of Pennsylvania, Stony Brook University, and the University of Chicago.

Later, Lee was appointed head of the department of theoretical physics at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1976.[2]

On June 16, 1977, Lee was killed in a car accident near Kewanee, Illinois while driving on Interstate 80.[3] At the time of his death, Lee was widely regarded by his peers as a world-class elementary particle physicist,[4][5][6][7] that had specialized in gauge theory and weak interactions.

Research

Gauge theory

In 1964, Lee published an article about spontaneous symmetry breaking with his advisor Abraham Klein and contributed to the appearance of Higgs mechanism.[8] He is often credited with the naming of the Higgs boson and Higgs mechanism.[9][10][11] In 1969, he succeeded in the renormalization of spontaneously broken gauge symmetries.[12] In the meantime, Dutch graduate student Gerardus 't Hooft was working in the case of local gauge symmetry breaking in the Yang–Mills theory using the Higgs mechanism. He met Lee and Symanzik at the Cargèse Summer School and consulted them on his work and got an insight.[13][14] He finally succeeded in the renormalization of non-abelian gauge theory and won the Nobel Prize later for this work.[15][16] David Politzer said in his 2004 Nobel Lecture that the particle physicists community at that time learned all from Lee who actually combined insights from his own work and from Russian physicists' work and encouraged 't Hooft's paper.[17]

Charm quark

Sheldon Glashow, Luciano Maiani and John Iliopoulos predicted charm quarks to match the experimental results. Lee wrote an article with Mary K. Gaillard and Jonathan L. Rosner,[18] predicting the mass of the charm quarks by calculating the quantities which correspond to the mixing and decay of K meson.

Cosmology

In 1977, Lee and Steven Weinberg wrote an article about the lower bound on heavy neutrino mass.[19] In this paper, they revealed that if the heavy and stable particles in the early universe which can only be transferred into other particles through the pair annihilation remain as relics after the universe's expansion, then the strength of the interaction should be bigger than 2 GeV. This calculation can be applied to find the amount of the dark matter. This bound is called the Lee-Weinberg bound.

Lee's promotion of gauge theories

Weinberg's 1967 paper A Model of Leptons[20] has over 15,000 citations and played a key role in the award of his 1979 Nobel prize. In 1972 at a conference at Fermilab, Lee gave a talk Perspectives on Theory of Weak Interactions[21] that brought Weinberg's 1967 paper out of obscurity and explained many aspects of gauge theories to a large audience.[22]

Controversy over death

A South Korean fictional novel allegedly based on Lee's death was published in 1993, which presumably suggested that Lee tried to help South Korea's dictatorship develop nuclear weapons, and implied that the U.S.' Central Intelligence Agency had some connection to his death. In actuality, he vigorously opposed the autocratic system of South Korea at that time and he canceled every program he designed for South Korean graduate education about particle physics in opposition to that government.[1] According to a Fermilab memoriam, Lee died in a car accident on Illinois highway I-80 in 1977, at age 42. A semi-trailer crossed the highway divide and collided with his car.

Bibliography

Book

  • Lee, Benjamin W. (1972). Chiral Dynamics. Documents on modern physics. New York: Gordon and Breach Science Publishers. ISBN 0-677-01380-9. 

Selected papers

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 JooSang Kang (2007) (in Korean). 이휘소평전(양장본 Hard Cover). LUX Media. ISBN 978-89-89822-70-7. https://books.google.com/books?id=leQMMwAACAAJ. 
  2. ↑ "Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter L". American Academy of Arts and Sciences. http://www.amacad.org/publications/BookofMembers/ChapterL.pdf. 
  3. ↑ "Dr. Benjamin Lee, 42, of Fermilab; Noted Physicist Was Crash Victim". The New York Times. 18 June 1977. https://www.nytimes.com/1977/06/18/archives/dr-benjamin-lee-42-of-fermilab-noted-physicist-was-crash-victim.html. 
  4. ↑ Chris Quigg; Steven Weinberg (Sep 1977). "Benjamin W. Lee". Physics Today 30 (9): 76. doi:10.1063/1.3037723. Bibcode: 1977PhT....30i..76Q. http://lutece.fnal.gov/Essays/BWL.html. 
  5. ↑ "In Memoriam Benjamin W. Lee". Fermilab. 1977. http://history.fnal.gov/lee_memoriam.html. 
  6. ↑ "Ben Lee Memorial International Conference at Fermi Lab". 1977. http://history.fnal.gov/lee_conference.html. 
  7. ↑ James Riordon. "PRL Top Ten: #1 A Model of Leptons (an APS News interview with Steven Weinberg)". American Physical Society. http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200308/prl-1.cfm. 
  8. ↑ A. Klein; B.W. Lee (1964). "Does Spontaneous Breakdown of Symmetry Imply Zero-Mass Particles?". Physical Review Letters 12 (10): 266. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.12.266. Bibcode: 1964PhRvL..12..266K. 
  9. ↑ "Rochester's Hagen Sakurai Prize Announcement" (Press release). University of Rochester. 2010. Archived from the original on 2008-04-16.
  10. ↑ C.R. Hagen Sakurai Prize Talk (YouTube). 2010.
  11. ↑ Ian Sample (29 May 2009), "Anything but the God particle", The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2009/may/29/why-call-it-the-god-particle-higgs-boson-cern-lhc 
  12. ↑ Benjamin W. Lee (1969). "Renormalization of the σ-model". Nuclear Physics B 9 (5): 649–672. doi:10.1016/0550-3213(69)90065-0. Bibcode: 1969NuPhB...9..649L. 
  13. ↑ Gerardus 't Hooft (1999). "Autobiography". http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1999/thooft-autobio.html. 
  14. ↑ Soo-Jong Rey (December 1999). "Error: no |title= specified when using {{Cite web}}" (in Korean). 물리학과 첨단기술. http://www.kps.or.kr/~pht/8-12/991220.html. 
  15. ↑ G. 't Hooft (1971). "Renormalizable Lagrangians for massive Yang-Mills fields". Nuclear Physics B 35 (1): 167–188. doi:10.1016/0550-3213(71)90139-8. Bibcode: 1971NuPhB..35..167T. 
  16. ↑ "Nobel '99 A Strong Vote for Electroweak Theory". Fermi News. 1999-12-17. http://www.fnal.gov/pub/ferminews/ferminews99-12-17/p2.html. 
  17. ↑ David Politzer (2004). "The Dilemma of Attribution". http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2004/politzer-lecture.html. 
  18. ↑ Gaillard, M. K.; Lee, B. W.; Rosner, J. L. (1975). "Search for charm". Rev. Mod. Phys. 47 (2): 277–310. doi:10.1103/RevModPhys.47.277. Bibcode: 1975RvMP...47..277G. 
  19. ↑ Lee B.W.; Weinberg S. (1977). "Cosmological Lower Bound on Heavy-Neutrino Masses". Physical Review Letters 39 (4): 165. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.39.165. Bibcode: 1977PhRvL..39..165L. 
  20. ↑ Weinberg, S. (1967). "A Model of Leptons". Phys. Rev. Lett. 19 (21): 1264–1266. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.19.1264. Bibcode: 1967PhRvL..19.1264W. http://astrophysics.fic.uni.lodz.pl/100yrs/pdf/12/066.pdf. 
  21. ↑ Lee, B. W. (1972). "Perspectives on Theory of Weak Interactions". EConf 720906 C720906V4: 249–305. http://inspirehep.net/record/79510/files/v4p249.pdf. 
  22. ↑ Veltman, Martinus (2003). Facts and mysteries in elementary particle physics. World Scientific. p. 274. ISBN 981238149X. https://archive.org/details/factsmysteriesin0000velt. 

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