Tsung-Dao Lee

Tsung-Dao (T. D.) Lee
李政道
T. D. Lee, seen in 1956
Native name 李政道 (Lǐ Zhèngdào)
Born (1926-11-24) November 24, 1926
Shanghai, China
Alma mater National Che Kiang University in Guizhou Province (dropped out)
National Southwestern Associated University in Kunming (dropped out)
University of Chicago
Known for Parity violation
Non-topological solitons
Awards Nobel Prize in Physics (1957)
Albert Einstein Award (1957)
Matteucci Medal (1995)
Scientific career
Fields Physics
Institutions Columbia University
Institute for Advanced Study
University of California, Berkeley
Thesis Hydrogen Content of White Dwarf Stars (1950)
Doctoral advisor Enrico Fermi
Doctoral students Richard M. Friedberg
Norman Christ
Signature

Tsung-Dao Lee (T. D. Lee; Chinese: 李政道; pinyin: Lǐ Zhèngdào; born November 24, 1926) is a Chinese-American physicist, known for his work on parity violation, the Lee Model, particle physics, relativistic heavy ion (RHIC) physics, nontopological solitons and soliton stars. He holds the rank of University Professor Emeritus at Columbia University, where he has taught since 1953 and from which he retired in 2012.[1]

In 1957, Lee, at the age of 30, won the Nobel Prize in Physics with Franklin C N Yang[2] for their work on the violation of the parity law in weak interactions, which Chien-Shiung Wu experimentally verified in 1956, with her so-called Wu experiment.

Lee was the youngest Nobel laureate after World War II until Malala Yousafzai was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014. He is the fourth youngest Nobel laureate in history after William L. Bragg (who won the prize at 25 with his father William H. Bragg in 1915), Werner Heisenberg (who won in 1932 also at 30) and Malala Yousafzai (awarded at just 17). Lee and Yang were the first Chinese laureates. Since he became a naturalized American citizen in 1962, Lee is also the youngest American ever to have won a Nobel Prize.

Biography

Family

Tsung-Dao (T. D.) Lee's ancestral hometown is Suzhou, Jiangsu Province. He was born in Shanghai.

Lee's father Chun-kang Lee (李駿康; Lǐ Jùn-kāng), one of the first graduates of the University of Nanking, was a chemical industrialist and merchant who was involved in China's early development of modern synthesized fertilizer. Lee's grandfather Chong-tan Lee (李仲覃; Lǐ Zhòng-tán) was the first Chinese Methodist Episcopal senior pastor of St. John's Church in Suzhou (蘇州聖約翰堂).[3]

Lee has four brothers and one sister. Educator Robert C.T. Lee is one of T. D.'s brothers. Lee's mother Chang and brother Robert C. T. moved to Taiwan in the 1950s. They were jailed in Taiwan during the White Terror.

Early life

Lee received his secondary education in Shanghai, Suzhou (High School Affiliated to Soochow University, 東吳大學附屬中學) and Jiangxi (Jiangxi Joint High School, 江西聯合中學). Due to the Second Sino-Japanese war, Lee's high school education was interrupted, thus he did not obtain his secondary diploma. Nevertheless, in 1943, Lee directly applied to and was admitted by the National Che Kiang University (now Zhejiang University). Initially, Lee registered as a student in the Department of Chemical Engineering. Very quickly, Lee's talent was discovered and his interest in physics grew rapidly. Several physics professors, including Shu Xingbei and Wang Kan-chang, largely guided Lee, and he soon transferred into the Department of Physics of National Che Kiang University (國立浙江大學), where he studied in 1943–1944.

However, again disrupted by a further Japanese invasion, Lee continued at the National Southwestern Associated University (國立西南聯合大學) in Kunming the next year in 1945, where he studied with Professor Wu Ta-you.

Life and research in US

Professor Wu nominated Lee for a Chinese government fellowship for graduate study in US. In 1946, Lee went to the University of Chicago and was selected by Professor Enrico Fermi to become his PhD student. Lee received PhD under Fermi in 1950 for his research work Hydrogen Content of White Dwarf Stars. Lee served as research associate and lecturer in physics at the University of California at Berkeley from 1950 to 1951.[4]

Tsung-Dao Lee in 2006

In 1953, Lee joined Columbia University, where he remained until retirement. His first work at Columbia was on a solvable model of quantum field theory better known as the Lee Model. Soon, his focus turned to particle physics and the developing puzzle of K meson decays. Lee realized in early 1956 that the key to the puzzle was parity non-conservation. At Lee's suggestion, the first experimental test was on hyperion decay by the Steinberger group. At that time, the experimental result gave only an indication of a 2 standard deviation effect of possible parity violation. Encouraged by this feasibility study, Lee made a systematic study of possible P,T,C and CP violations in weak interactions with collaborators, including C. N. Yang. After the definitive experimental confirmation by C.S. Wu and her collaborators of parity non-conservation, Lee and Yang were awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize for Physics.

In the early 1960s, Lee and collaborators initiated the important field of high energy neutrino physics. In 1964, Lee, with M. Nauenberg, analyzed the divergences connected with particles of zero rest mass, and described a general method known as the KLN theorem for dealing with these divergences, which still plays an important role in contemporary work in QCD, with its massless, self-interacting gluons. In 1974–75, Lee published several papers on "A New Form of Matter in High Density", which led to the modern field of RHIC physics, now dominating the entire high energy nuclear physics field.

Besides particle physics, Lee has been active in statistical mechanics, astrophysics, hydrodynamics, many body system, solid state, lattice QCD. In 1983, Lee wrote a paper entitled, "Can Time Be a Discrete Dynamical Variable?"; which led to a series of publications by Lee and collaborators on the formulation of fundamental physics in terms of difference equations, but with exact invariance under continuous groups of translational and rotational transformations. Beginning in 1975, Lee and collaborators established the field of non-topological solitons, which led to his work on soliton stars and black holes throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

From 1997 to 2003 Lee was director of the RIKEN-BNL Research Center (now director emeritus), which together with other researchers from Columbia, completed a 1 teraflops supercomputer QCDSP for lattice QCD in 1998 and a 10 teraflops QCDOC machine in 2001. Most recently, Lee and Richard M. Friedberg have developed a new method to solve the Schrödinger Equation, leading to convergent iterative solutions for the long-standing quantum degenerate double-wall potential and other instanton problems. They have also done work on the neutrino mapping matrix.

Educational activities

Soon after the re-establishment of China-American relations with the PRC, Lee and his wife, Jeannette Hui-Chun Chin (秦惠䇹; Qín Huìjūn), were able to go to China, where Lee gave a series of lectures and seminars, and organized the CUSPEA (China-U.S. Physics Examination and Application).

In 1998, Lee established the Chun-Tsung Endowment (秦惠䇹—李政道中国大学生见习基金) in memory of his wife, who had died 3 years earlier. The Chun-Tsung scholarships, supervised by the United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia (New York), are awarded to undergraduates, usually in their 2nd or 3rd year, at six universities, which are Shanghai Jiaotong University, Fudan University, Lanzhou University, Soochow University, Peking University and Taiwan National Tsing Hua University. Students selected for such scholarships are named "Chun-Tsung Scholars" (䇹政学者).

Personal life

Chin and Lee were married in 1950 and have two sons: James and Stephen. Lee reads whodunit novels when not working on physics. The English spelling of his given name, "Tsung-Dao", differs slightly from the standard Chinese Romanization systems in use at the time of his childhood, Wade–Giles and Gwoyeu Romatzyh. Tsung-Dao Lee's publications are all under the name of T.D. Lee.

Honours and awards

Awards
Memberships

Bibliography

Technical Reports
Books
  • Lee, T.D. (1981). Particle Physics and Introduction to Field Theory. Newark: Harwood Academic Publishers. ISBN 3-7186-0032-3.
  • Lee, T.D.; Feinberg, G. (1986). Selected Papers, Vols 13. Boston; Basel; Stuttgart: Birkhäuser. ISBN 0-8176-3344-8.
  • Lee, T.D. (1988). Ed. R. Novick: Thirty Year's Since Parity Nonconservation. Boston; Basel; Stuttgart: Birkhäuser. ISBN 0-8176-3375-8.
  • Lee, T.D. (1988). Symmetries, Asymmetries, and the World of Particles. Seattle: University of Washington Press. ISBN 0-295-96519-3.
  • Lee, T.D.; Ren, H. C.; Pang, Y. (1998). Selected Papers, 1985-1996. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach. ISBN 90-5699-609-6.
  • Lee, T.D. (2000). Science and Art. Shanghai: Shanghai Scientific and Technical Publisher. ISBN 7-5323-5609-4.
  • Lee, T.D. (2002). The Challenge from Physics. Beijing: China Economics Publisher. ISBN 7-5017-5622-8.
  • Lee, T.D.; Cheng, Ji; Huaizu, Liu; Li, Teng (2004). Response to the Dispute of Discovery of Parity Violation (in Chinese). Lanzhou, Gansu: Gansu Science and Technology Publishing House. ISBN 7-5424-0929-8.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Home | Columbia News Archived 2012-04-30 at the Wayback Machine.
  2. ↑ "The Nobel Prize in Physics 1957". The Nobel Foundation. Retrieved November 1, 2014.
  3. ↑ "Suzhou St. John Church". Archived from the original on 2015-07-13.
  4. ↑ HowStuffWorks "Lee, Tsung Dao"
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