Particle theorists David Gross, David Politzer, and Frank Wilczek have been awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics “for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interactions.” The laureates are, respectively, professors of physics at the University of California in Santa Barbara, Caltech, and MIT. The discovery was made in 1973 by Gross and Wilczek 1 at Princeton University and, independently, by Politzer 2 at Harvard University. At the time, Wilczek was Gross’s graduate student and Politzer was a graduate student of Sidney Coleman.
Asymptotic freedom refers to the vanishing of the strong nuclear force between quarks as the distance between them goes to zero. The surprising discovery by Gross, Wilczek, and Politzer that a certain class of quantum field theories has this property led quite quickly to quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the now standard theory of the strong interactions (see the article by Wilczek in Physics...
