Field of Research:
Elementary Particle Physics
In Germany:
01.09.2007 -
30.11.2007
Host's project description
Peter Minkowski, together with Harald Fritzsch, developed the leading candidate theory for the unified description of the electromagnetic, the weak and strong nuclear forces in which these are considered as different manifestations of a single fundamental force. The theory is based on the symmetry group SO(10). Later, this theory was also incorporated in the superstring theories. In another common work, different scenarios for gluonic states, whose existence is predicted in the theory of Quantumchromodynamics, have been proposed and some possibilities for their experimental detection investigated.
Together with Harald Fritzsch and Murray Gell-Mann, Peter Minkowski wrote a paper on vector-like weak currents in 1975. There, the parity violation, seen in the weak interactions, was attributed to the mass terms for leptons and quarks. The neutral current was predicted to be vectorial. In 1978 this theory was excluded by the experiments at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), which demonstrated a parity violation also in the neutral current. In 1976 he wrote ,with Harald Fritzsch, one of the first papers on neutrino oscillations. This publication encouraged Felix Boehm from California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Rudolf Mößbauer from the Technical University Munich to perform experiments at the reactors in Grenoble and later in Gösgen, Switzerland. No oscillations were found at that time. Neutrino oscillations were observed for the first time in 2000 in Japan.
In 1977 Minkowski wrote a paper, in which he discussed for the first time the mechanism for mass generation for neutrinos, which later was called the seesaw mechanism, according to a paper to Gell-Mann and Slansky and a paper by Yanagida.
More recently, Peter Minkowski, in collaboration with Wolfgang Ochs from the MPI for Physics in Munich, suggested an interpretation of the observed spectrum of light mesons which includes a gluonic resonance as predicted by the Quantumchromodynamics theory.
Peter Minkowski is very well-known among particle physicists and beyond. His lifetime achievements are in particular the SO(10) theory of Grand Unification and the seesaw mechanisms for neutrino mass generation.
During his stay in the host institute, he intends to study massive neutrinos in the theory of Grand Unification, following earlier ideas about the seesaw mechanism. Another proposal has to do with scalar hadrons and gluonic resonances in Quantumchromodynamics.
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Institut für Theoretische Physik
Universität Bern
Sidlerstr. 5
3012
Bern
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