Deceased--Alfred Mann

Alfred Mann
1921 to January 13th, 2013

"Alfred Mann, physics professor"

by

Tom Avril

January 23rd, 2013

Philadelphia Inquirer

Alfred K. Mann was known to the public for his decorated career in particle physics, and to his family members as a student of history and literature who quoted Cicero at the dinner table.

More than a decade after retiring from the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Mann, who died Sunday, Jan. 13, at age 92, added another line to his resumé: protester.

In 2003, Dr. Mann helped organize a campaign against the proposed closure of an 8,000-foot-deep South Dakota gold mine that was seen as an ideal site to measure the subatomic particles called neutrinos.

Enough people took up his cry a decade ago that experiments in the mine are now under way. His efforts in advocating to keep the mine open were recognized by a proclamation from the governor of South Dakota, said Eugene Beier, a Penn physics professor who collaborated with Dr. Mann on numerous occasions.

A longtime resident of Bala Cynwyd who lived most recently in Jenkintown, Dr. Mann was born in New York and attended the University of Virginia for both his undergraduate and graduate studies. He spent two years working on a way to enrich uranium - an effort he later learned was part of the Manhattan Project, the U.S. effort to build the first atomic bomb.

A different uranium enrichment method was ultimately used to make the bombs that were dropped on Japan, yet Dr. Mann was nevertheless shaken when he learned of the purpose of the research, his son Brian said. The physicist heard about the first bomb from a newsboy hawking papers on the street, his son said.

"He said he stopped and grabbed the paper, and literally felt like he was going to pass out," Brian Mann said. "The effect of what that meant to the world really struck him."

Dr. Mann joined the faculty at Penn in 1949 after a stint at Columbia University. He was perhaps best known for his discoveries of fundamental properties of neutrinos, which are essential to the process of fusion.

"The stars could not burn without them," said Beier, who joined Dr. Mann on several of his findings.

Neutrinos are emitted in countless numbers by the sun and other stars. The South Dakota mine was seen as a good place to detect them because the earth acts as a filter. Most cosmic radiation is blocked from reaching that deep into the Earth, whereas neutrinos can slip right through.

During their careers, Dr. Mann and Beier helped make the first direct measurements of neutrinos emitted by the sun, and also measured the particles coming from a supernova, an experience Dr. Mann recounted in the 1987 book, Shadow of a Star.

Brian Mann said his father was not openly affectionate but rarely became angry. Rather than give his children the answer to a problem, he would urge them to seek it on their own, offering guidance by quoting Lincoln, Jefferson, and Franklin.

"That's just the kind of intellectual property that was being thrown about the house routinely," Brian Mann said. "It was not, 'Hey, how'd the Phils do today?' "

From the University of Pennsylvania...

Honors include:

Shared in Asahi Prize, Japan (1987)
Rossi Prize of the American Astronomical Society (1984)
Guggenheim Fellow (1981-82)
Fulbright Fellow, Australian National University (1955-56)
Fellow, Americal Physical Society
Sigma Xi
Phi Beta Kappa

Education:

Ph.D., University of Virginia (1947)
M.S., University of Virginia (1946)
B.A., University of Virginia (1942)

Research Interests:

Experimental Particle Physics

Alfred K. Mann is an emeritus professor of physics whose present interests are in elementary particle physics and astrophysics. In particle physics, emphasis is on the properties of neutrinos, in particular their masses, and whether nature allows different neutrino flavors to mix, or rigorously maintains separate lepton number conservation. In astrophysics, his interests are in Supernovae and the Sun, and most recently in the energy generating mechanisms of the extraordinarily luminous objects Gamma-Ray Bursters and Active Galactic Nuclei as possible sources of the highest energy cosmic rays and UHE neutrinos. Recent papers are concerned in particular with how to search for such UHE neutrinos.

Selected Publications:

"Observation of a Neutrino Burst from the Supernova SN 1987A," K.S. Hirata et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 58, 1490 (1987).
"Experimental Study of the Atmospheric Neutrino Flux, K.S. Hirata et al., Phys. Lett. B 205, 416 (1988).
"Experimental Limit on the Flux of Relic Antineutrinos from Past Supernovae," K.S. Hirata et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 61, 385 (1988).
"Observation in the Kamiokande-II Detector of the Neutrino Burst from the Supernova SN 1987A," K.S. Hirata et al., Phys. Rev. D. 38, 448 (1988).
"Observation of Boron Eight Solar Neutrinos in the Kamiokande-II Detector," K.S. Hirata et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 63, 16 (1989).
"A Lunar-Based Detector to Search for Relic Supernovae Antineutrinos," A.K. Mann and W. Zhang in Proc. of the NASA Workshop on Physics and Astrophysics from a Lunar Base, Stanford, CA, 1989, Comments on Nuclear and Particle Physics XIX, 295, 1990. Also published under AIP Conference Proceedings 202. AIP, p 128.
"Solar Neutrinos," R. Davis, Jr., A.K. Mann and L. Wolfenstein, Ann. Rev. Nucl. and Particle Science 39, 467 (1989).
"Real-Time, Directional Measurement of Boron Eight Solar Neutrinos in the Kamiokande-II Detector," K.S. Hirata et al., Phys. Rev. D 44, 2241 (1991).
"Neutrino Astronomy," R.J. Davis, Jr. and A.K. Mann in Encyclopedia of Physical Science and Technology, Second Edition, Academic Press, 1992.
"Atmospheric Neutrino Data and Neutrino Oscillations," W. Frati et al., Phys. Rev. 48, 1140 (1993).
"Atmospheric Muon-type Neutrino to Electron-type Neutrino Ratio in the Multi-GeV Energy Range," Y. Fukuda et al., Phys. Lett. B 335, 237 (1994).
"Measurement of the Reaction Muon-type Neutrino Onto Carbon Twelve Near Threshold," M. Albert et al., (LSND Collab.) Phys. Rev. C 51, 1067 (1995).

Shadow of a Star: The Neutrino Story of Supernova 1987A

by

Alfred K. Mann

ISBN-10: 0716730979
ISBN-13: 978-0716730972

Higgs boson announcement...the drama is not effective

"Physicists to Make Major 'God Particle' Announcement Next Week"

by

Jeanna Bryner

December 8th, 2011

LiveScience

Scientists at the Swiss lab that hosts the world's largest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), will announce their latest findings in the search for an elusive subatomic particle called the Higgs boson or "God particle," next week. Already blogs and online news outlets are abuzz with speculation about the big announcement.

The CERN lab in Geneva has cautioned that LHC's ATLAS and CMS experiments have not accrued enough data to make any conclusive statement on the existence or non-existence of the Higgs boson, an as yet undetected particle thought to give all other particles their mass.

Even so, the BBC is reporting that a "respected scientist from the CERN particle physics laboratory has told the BBC he expects to see 'the first glimpse' of the Higgs boson next week."

The LHC is a 17-mile (27-kilometer) long underground circular tunnel where particles are smashed into one another at near light speed. The collisions produce enormous amounts of energy, releasing various exotic particles that may include the Higgs boson.

Doubts about the Higgs boson?

"Is the Higgs boson real?"

Rumours abound that Cern scientists have finally glimpsed the long-sought Higgs boson. We asked physicists to share their thoughts on the elusive entity.

by

Ian Sample

December 6th, 2011

guardian.co.uk

Soon after Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the director general at Cern, emailed staff about next Tuesday's seminar on the most sought-after particle in modern times, rumours hit the physics blogs that the lab might finally have caught sight of the Higgs boson.

I wrote last week that the heads of the two groups that work on the Atlas and CMS detectors at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will give the talks. That in itself is telling – usually more junior researchers present updates on the search for the missing particle.

Last month, scientists at the lab said that if the particle exists, it was most likely to have a mass somewhere between 114 and 141GeV (gigaelectronvolts), where one GeV is roughly equivalent to the mass of a proton, a subatomic particle found in atomic nuclei.

A couple of blogs, including viXra and Peter Woit's Not Even Wrong, have now posted rumours that the Atlas and CMS teams see Higgs-like signals around 125GeV, though they say the evidence is not robust enough to claim an official discovery.

If the rumours are right and precede a discovery, it means the Higgs boson weighs as much as two copper atoms. That fits quite well with a theory called supersymmetry, which gives physicists a way to unify the four known forces of nature, a feat that frustrated Einstein to the grave.

But enough of the rumours. When the seminar was announced – and before the rumours surfaced – I asked some physicists to share, in a couple of simple sentences, their hunches on what gives mass to fundamental particles. Is it the simplest version of the Higgs mechanism, which gives us what is called the Standard Model Higgs boson? Is it a more complex kind of Higgs field? Or something else entirely? I hoped the replies would give a flavour of the range of views they hold.

Most got back to me. A few kept their replies to a couple of sentences. Some included technical language, and perhaps that was inevitable. One Nobel prizewinner said the Higgs boson doesn't exist. Another responded with a limerick.

Before I list the replies, here is some background. The Higgs mechanism describes an invisible field that, it is argued, split one force into two soon after the birth of the universe. Specifically, it divided an ancient "electroweak" force into the electromagnetic and weak forces we see at work today. The latter is seen in some radioactive decay processes, and is involved in creating sunshine.

The Higgs field splits the electroweak force by giving mass to the particles that carry the weak force (the W & Z bosons) and leaving the particle that carries the electromagnetic force (the photon) massless. The Higgs boson is the quantum particle associated with the Higgs field.

The simplest version of the Higgs boson is described by the Standard Model, a group of equations that explain how known particles interact with each other. There are plenty more complex versions though. Some of these could take ten years to rule out, according to Matt Strassler, a physicist at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

One more point. The Higgs field, if real, is responsible for only a tiny proportion of mass. Around 98% of mass of everyday objects comes from the energy stored up in the particles that make atomic nuclei, i.e. quarks that are bound together by gluons inside protons and neutrons. The Higgs field is thought to give mass to quarks and electrons, but that makes up only one or two percent of an object's mass. Let's say I weigh 80kg. That means less than a kilo comes from the Higgs field.

Here are the physicists' responses, in no particular order:

Shelly Glashow, Boston University. Nobel prize in physics, 1979

"They said when the collider goes on
Soon they'd see that elusive boson
Very soon we shall hear
Whether Cern finds it this year
But it's something I won't bet very much on."

Frank Wilczek, MIT, Nobel prize in physics, 2004

"The Higgs mechanism for generating masses is extremely attractive and has no real competition. Beyond that there's little certainty. A near-minimal implementation of supersymmetry, perhaps augmented with ultra-weakly interacting particles, is the prettiest possibility. So I'd like several Higgs particles, Higgsinos, some ghostly stuff, and a pony."

[Note: A Higgsino is a supersymmetric partner of a Higgs boson].

Lisa Randall, author of Knocking on Heaven's Door, Harvard

"It is difficult to think of alternatives that are consistent theoretically and with everything observed to date that don't involve the Higgs mechanism – the process of essentially distributing a 'charge' throughout the vacuum. Elementary particles interact with this 'charge' and acquire mass. It is not necessarily clear, however, what is responsible for that charge in the first place and that is what determines what experiments will see.

"I still think the most likely answer is a conventional light Higgs boson. But when asked what I thought the odds were in a popular lecture, I surprised myself by saying 70%. I've even bet chocolate based on those odds. If not true, I think a heavier composite Higgs boson made up of more fundamental components might be the answer."

John Terning, University of California, Davis

"We know that strong interactions of quarks and gluons provide the bulk of the proton's mass; I suspect that there are some new – very strongly interacting – particles that provide the masses for the fundamental particles. The most spectacular possibility is that these new particles are the magnetic monopoles that Paul Dirac predicted."

Martinus Veltman, Universities of Michigan and Utrecht. Nobel prize in physics, 1999

"You are mistaken about the Higgs search at Cern. The machine runs at half energy so far, and no one expects relevant (for the Higgs particle) results. After the shutdown [in 2013] the machine will gradually go up in energy, and if all goes well (this is non-trivial) then in about half a year the machine energy might reach design value and there might be Higgs-relevant results. So if you are thinking next week then you are mistaken. Of course, we never know what surprises nature has in store for us … It is my opinion that there is no Higgs."

Philip Anderson, Princeton University. Nobel prize in physics, 1977

"I doubt if the opinions of one who thinks about these problems perhaps every 30 years or so will carry much weight. I've been busy. But the last time I thought, I realised a) that the Higgs(-A) mechanism fits the facts too beautifully not to be true, but b) it must be incomplete, because there's no proper accounting of the vacuum energy."

[Note: Anderson essentially described the Higgs mechanism in 1962, two years before Higgs and five other physicists published the theory.]

David Kaplan, University of Washington, Seattle

"I expect some variant of the Standard Model is correct, such as a two-Higgs doublet theory, although later one could well discover the Higgs bosons to be composite particles. Discovery of neutrino masses has opened a window onto physics beyond the Standard Model, and discovery of the mass-generation mechanism for quarks and leptons will open it wider."

[Note: the two Higgs doublet model calls for five Higgs bosons]

David Curtin, Stony Brook University

"It could be the Standard Model Higgs, but I sincerely hope not. Only data will reveal what nature chose, but two of my favourite alternatives are extra dimensions and supersymmetry – their discovery would tell us incredibly exciting things about several fundamental questions, including (but not limited to) the nature of space-time itself."

Gerard 't Hooft, Utrecht University, Nobel prize in physics 1999

"The whole idea that something should give mass to the fundamental particles is a hype that resulted from over-commercialisation of the Higgs theory, which actually might backfire on us. Fact is that in our present theoretical descriptions, most of the mass terms in the equations for the fundamental particles appear to violate an important symmetry (chiral symmetry) unless they can be connected to an additional field, the Higgs field, which would also require the existence of a not yet discovered particle, the Higgs particle …

"However, since chiral symmetry is unavoidable for the inner consistency of our description of the fundamental particles, the beautiful theoretical prediction of a Standard Model Higgs particle still stands out, and I still consider the near discovery of such a particle very likely. Alternative descriptions, such as many Higgs particles, each of which are more difficult to detect, or some altogether different mechanism, are much less attractive theoretically. As we know from the history of science, this argument does not suffice to rule out the existence of such alternatives, but I consider them much less probable."

David Miller, University of Glasgow

"Technicolor models use a new force of nature to generate particle masses. This new force is very strong, confining particles in bound states, and the binding energy gives the mass of the state. This is directly analogous to the generation of mass for the proton by the strong nuclear force."

Neutrino speed must be subjected to the "scientific method"

"Not so fast, neutrinos"

MIT physics professors examine the subatomic speed limit controversy

by

Stephanie Holden

October 14th, 2011

The Tech

On Sept. 23, European scientists announced that they had observed neutrinos, a class of subatomic particles, traveling faster than the speed of light — the universe’s fundamental “speed limit.” The experiment, OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus), was a collaboration between the Italian Gran Sasso National Laboratory (LNGS) and Europe’s high-energy physics laboratory CERN. Since the announcement of this anomaly, the scientific community has been hotly debating its validity, as well as the possibilities that could arise from such results.

MIT Physics Professor Scott A. Hughes said, “Carl Sagan had this saying, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This is not extraordinary evidence.”

Hughes pointed out that the OPERA experiment was not originally designed for measuring the speed of neutrinos. The main goal was to transmute — or convert — one type of neutrino, called a muon neutrino, into a tau neutrino, a heavier type of particle.

Hughes conceded that the researchers “have done as good a job as they can, but this is extremely hard to measure … there’s this table of systematic errors in their measurements, and one error tends to dominate. If they combined their errors in a different way, their results could have been within the error bars.”

“I don’t think the paper is outlandish,” added Physics Professor Janet Conrad.

However, she and Physics Professor Frank Wilczek — a Nobel laureate — both said that the main evidence that contradicts OPERA’s result is the data set from Supernova 1987A, when neutrinos produced from the star explosion arrived only a few hours before the light did (neutrinos leave the dying star before visible light from the explosion).

Every supernova is accompanied by production and emission of a massive quantity of neutrinos. Physicists can calculate the relative time between when the neutrinos are emitted and when the light is emitted from the explosion. If OPERA’s results are correct, however, the neutrinos should have travelled faster and arrived a few years before the light.

Hughes and Wilczek both guess that scientists will most likely approach the neutrino announcement with a variety of new experiments and do tests with different baselines.

“I would say there’s a 98 percent chance this is a systematic error,” Hughes said.

Scientists note that other predictions of special relativity are valid, and that these neutrinos might be something “special and weird.”

“Within the theoretical framework, we have been very successful in other parts, which is why it’s hard to isolate this neutrino ‘disease’ in this small sector,” Wilczek said.

But no one is claiming that the European researchers were careless. On the contrary, Wilczek believes that all of the scientists are “competent, professional experimenters who have been wrestling with this for months and can’t make this go away.”

“I’m not claiming they’ve done it wrong, I’m saying that it needs looking at very carefully,” added Hughes. “There’s a big difference between precision and accuracy — you can measure with precision a very inaccurate result.”

What if it’s true?

If it is true that neutrinos can travel faster than the speed of light, fascinating new lines of inquiry could open. One theory is that these speedy neutrinos could be a crack in the universe that reveals extra dimensions in high energies.

“If this were correct, our GPS wouldn’t work,” Hughes said of the navigation technology that relies on relativistic principles.

“It’s premature, to say the least, to speculate wildly about the implications, either theoretically or technologically,” said Wilczek.

Talk in the media about traveling in time or having causal loops were a misunderstanding of relativity. “If there’s any limiting speed, even if it’s not the speed of light, one would not be able to close the loop from the future to the past,” Wilczek added.

Although he is doubtful of the results, Hughes does not have any criticism of OPERA’s report itself. “The paper is very clear — they say they’re throwing [this discovery] out there for further testing. Their paper is very careful and pretty conservative.”

He found it “irresponsible,” however, that the authors held a press conference immediately after their accidental discovery. In fact, some of the researchers who were part of OPERA actually removed their names from the paper because they found the analysis to be too preliminary to be able to release the results in such a manner.

“This is one of the few things that reveals the tension that was going on within the experiment,” Hughes pointed out.

Public reaction

The fact that this story has made a huge appearance in headlines over the past few weeks does not surprise Hughes, but he is worried that after it dies down, any future and possibly contradictory discoveries will not have as large an impact in the media.

“No headline will say, ‘Oops, we goofed.’ … My concern is that this potentially big splash will not be compensated for by correction,” said Hughes.

Physics student Asher C. Kaboth G also noted that “It’s harder for the general public to understand the little details … it’s difficult to explain.” Those who do not know much about special relativity might have misconceptions about what these results mean and their possible implications, he said.

Conrad did not like the way some physicists reacted to the news. “Way up there in the responses I don’t like [is], ‘If it doesn’t fit my theory, it must be wrong.’ That’s not okay to tell people.”

She said that if neutrinos really do travel faster than the speed of light, it breaks current theories and scientists will have to construct new ones.

“There’s a difference between us saying what nature will do and nature telling us what it does,” Conrad said. “When you find a violation, you have to find a way to put it in the perspective of other data.”

Despite concerns, the neutrino results have been a great teaching opportunity for many professors. In Hughes’s 8.033 (Relativity) class, he discussed the concept of the experiment in lecture and asked students to think carefully about whether they believed that neutrinos could travel faster than the speed of light.

“In the hands of someone who can discuss this well, and the ears of students open to listening, it’s a great topic,” Hughes said.

Conrad also brought up the subject in her 8.02 (Electricity and Magnetism) class and asked her students to answer questions like “If this result is proven wrong, what does this say about science? Does science ever get it right?” Her opinion is that things go wrong in science all the time, but the beauty is that one discovery leads to the next, and we continue to change what we know about the world.

Wilczek agreed that on the whole, it’s a good thing that people are noticing current research in physics, and that there is exposure of the scientific process. “There’s something about Einstein and space that even after all these years has a certain magic because it’s so profound and unexplained,” he said.

Takuya Uruno and particle physics manga adventures

[Enlarge to read.]

"Bam! Sproing! Gyaaa!"

In the Web series Kasoku Kids, a Manga artist delivers particle physics with feeling.

by

Nicholas Bock

August 2009

Symmetry

In Japanese, Takuya Uruno’s first name means "pioneer." In his 25-year career as a professional Manga artist, Uruno has been steadfast in living up to the title. He has spent only five years working on the popular serials that Manga is most commonly associated with and another 20 working in advertising and public relations, trying to find ways that Manga can function as something more than entertainment.

"Although Manga in public relations is similar to the ordinary Manga in technique and theme, it requires a different set of skills," he says. "My mission is to explore Manga’s new potential and to pioneer a new field. I am quite a rare case even within this country in which Manga is very big."

When KEK Communications Director Youhei Morita asked Uruno to help design a suite of kid-oriented pages for the KEK Web site, it was the perfect opportunity to push Manga’s role even further. KEK is the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization in Tsukuba, Japan. Working closely with scientists at the laboratory, Uruno came up with a series of episodes in which four children working on a science fair project visit KEK and meet two physicists, who take them on a tour.

The goal for Uruno was not to teach specific physics concepts, but to captivate his audience and to generate interest in science—to get people interested in high-energy physics and what physicists at labs like KEK do.

"I tried to depict children learning physics, rather than physics studied by children," he says. "Some are skeptical, others holding up their hopes, and they all come to KEK. Their encounter with doctors who are seriously searching for the secrets of the universe excites their interest in science."

Uruno found that Manga was extremely well-suited to navigating the conceptually complex waters of particle physics. Unlike reading a textbook, he said, Manga provides readers with a more immersive experience, enabling them to make stronger connections with different ideas.

"It is easier to understand complicated matters when one projects his or her feelings onto others and explores the experience," he says. "The characters are exactly for that purpose. The readers relive the drama, and the emotions can improve their understanding."

Other times Uruno had to defy Manga orthodoxy, finding new ways to present the topic without inadvertently limiting readers’ conceptions—something that can be hard to do when trying to graphically represent things that have never been observed.

"To depict a single elementary particle, I refused to go into the traditional Manga style in which animals or ordinary matters are personified," he said. "I presented it instead to be something obscure and vague so as to let the readers explore the real mysteries of the smallest entity."

Manga

Nguyen Van Hieu [particle physicist]--celebrates 70 years

Nguyen Van Hieu [right] at his birthday celebration

"100 scientists celebrate Nguyen Van Hieu’s 70th birthday"

July 28th, 2008

VietNamNet Bridge

Around 100 scientists participated in a ceremony held on July 24 in HCM City to celebrate the 70th birthday of professor, academician Nguyen Van Hieu.

The ceremony was held by the Institute for Application Material Sciences in cooperation with some agencies under the Vietnam Science and Technology Institute.

Nguyen Van Hieu, born in 1938, is the eldest son of a family with ten children. In 1956, he graduated from Hanoi Teachers’ Training University and began teaching physics at Hanoi University.

In early 1958, in the university auditorium, he attended Professor Ta Quang Buu's talk on two Chinese-American scientists' discovery of "non-conservation of evenness-oddity in deficient interactions." He was captivated by their lectures, which opened his mind to the new horizon of studying the mysteries of matter. He went straight to the books. Fortunately, the university had at its command a large library brought all the way from a university campus in China. And new books on science-technology from the Soviet Union were also available at the foreign language bookshop on Trang Tien Street.

Some time later, he was sent to the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, Dubna, in the former Soviet Union for research on theoretical physics. Just one year later, he published an article. Academician Bogolubov, the Dubna Institute director, at once set his eyes on the young Vietnamese scientist along with his theory and foresaw he would have a bright future in science.

After four years of hard work at Dubna, Hieu successfully defended his doctoral thesis on Neutrino Physics and his PhD thesis 'Asymptotic relations of scattering amplitudes in relativistic local quantum field theory.' The Soviet scientists rated him as a scientist of high calibre and his theses excellent. After the successful defence of his PhD thesis, he started studying with great intensity "a theory of symmetries of elementary particles".

In 1967 alone he accomplished 20 studies that were later included in the book entitled 'Lectures on the Theory of Unitary Symmetry of Elementary Particles'.

In the same year, he started working with the Soviet scientist Academician Anatoly Logunov, director of physics at the Institute for High Energies in Serpukhov, on a project to study the multi-production process in high energies-inclusive processes. It took 15 years and on December 21, 1989, the Soviet Union State Commission for Inventions conferred upon him Diploma No 228, certifying that, in co-operation with several Soviet scientists, headed by Mr Logunov, he discovered a new law of nuclear physics at high energy: scale invariance of multi-production cross sections.

The theory of Nguyen Van Hieu and his associates was checked and verified by tests and experiments by prestigious scientists and well-known laboratories in the world. The law helps us understand better the micro-worlds with mechanisms for interaction in the creation of material particles, and it greatly helps to boost the development of nuclear physics at high energy, both theoretically and experimentally.

In 1982, Nguyen Van Hieu was elected academician of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and in 1986 he was awarded the Lenin Prize, the highest distinction of the Soviet State.

Recalling those years, he told me: "It was the golden time of my life. It was thanks to the excellent professors and the good conditions for study that I could make some contributions to science. All this was responsible for what I have achieved."

Professor Nguyen Van Hieu is the author of hundreds of scientific works in two domains: theory of quantum field and theory of solids. In addition, he made great contributions to the formation of the National Institute of Physics and the National Institute of Sciences of Vietnam, which were built from scratch on plots of land in the outskirts of the city, with buildings equipped for scientific research and co-operation with foreign scientists.

Besides engaging himself with great passion in scientific research, he shows no less concern over the training of scientists.

From the early days of the establishment of the Institute, he gave lectures to the young scientists conducting research on the theory of physics, helping them study the application of approaches of theory of quantum field in their research of up-to-date theory of solids.

He has also expanded co-operation with foreign countries, joining in scientific research with them; he has sent young researchers to work in laboratories overseas under the guidance of great scientists, in the direction of the development of the Institute.

In 1996-2000, in the Vietnamese physics sector alone, Nguyen Van Hieu was president of the Scientific Council in four branches of research – theoretical physics, nuclear physics, physics of solid state, optics and spectroscopy – trained 24 PhD's, published 580 scientific articles and 11 scientific monographs.

Nguyen Van Hieu has assumed various posts: director of National Institute of Physics, director of National Institute of Sciences of Vietnam, member of the Scientific Council of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research of Dubna and full-power representative of Vietnam at the Institute, leader of the Intercosmos Programme of Vietnam, deputy editor-in-chief of the international review 'Physics of Elementary Particles and Atomic Nuclei'.

For some time, he has been involved in the Party Central Committee as a minister and participated in a number of decisive resolutions of the state. However, what he likes best is conducting scientific research and giving lectures to students. After giving up managerial posts, he has made great efforts to prepare for the training of students, first of all with a complete set of manuals in the spirit of Nguyen Van Hieu. As he sees it, the manuals should embrace the most up-to-date, concise and essential instruction.

In 1996, the state of Vietnam conferred the Ho Chi Minh Prize upon him – the highest award for those who have made excellent contributions to science and culture.

If you care to read some of his papers visit arXiv.


Nguyen Van Hieu