Alexandru Proca
| Alexandru Proca | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born |
October 16, 1897, Bucharest, Kingdom of Romania |
| Died | December 13, 1955 (aged 58) Paris, France |
| Citizenship | France |
| Nationality | Romania |
| Fields | Physicist (theoretical) |
| Alma mater | Paris-Sorbonne University in France |
| Doctoral advisor | Louis de Broglie |
| Known for | Proca's equations |
| Notable awards | Honorary Member of the Romanian Academy of Arts and Sciences, elected post mortem in 1990. |
Alexandru Proca (October 16, 1897, Bucharest – December 13, 1955, Paris) was a Romanian physicist who studied and worked in France. He developed the vector meson theory of nuclear forces and the relativistic quantum field equations that bear his name (Proca's equations) for the massive, vector spin-1 mesons. He became a French citizen in 1931.
In Romania, he was one of the eminent students of the school "Gheorghe Lazăr" and the Polytechnic School in Bucharest. With a very strong interest in theoretical physics, he went to Paris where he graduated in Science from the Paris-Sorbonne University, receiving from the hand of Marie Curie his diploma of the Bachelor of Science degree. Then, he was employed as a researcher/physicist at the Radium Institute in Paris in 1925.
He carried out Ph.D. studies in theoretical physics under the supervision of Nobel laureate Louis de Broglie. He defended successfully his Ph.D. thesis entitled "On the relativistic theory of Dirac's electron" in front of an examination committee chaired by the Nobel laureate Jean Perrin.
In 1929, Proca became the editor of the influential physics journal Les Annales de l'Institut Henri Poincaré. Then, in 1934, he spent an entire year with Erwin Schrödinger in Berlin, but visited only for a few months with Nobel laureate Niels Bohr in Copenhagen where he also met Werner Heisenberg and George Gamow.
Proca came to be known as one of the most influential Romanian theoretical physicists of the last century, having developed the vector meson theory of nuclear forces in 1936, ahead of the first reports of Hideki Yukawa, who employed Proca's equations for the vectorial mesonic field as a starting point. Yukawa subsequently received the Nobel Prize for an explanation of the nuclear forces by using a pi-mesonic field and predicting correctly the existence of the pion, initially called a 'mesotron' by Yukawa. Pions being the lightest mesons play a key role in explaining the properties of the strong nuclear forces in their lower energy range. Unlike the massive spin-1 bosons in Proca's equations, the pions predicted by Yukawa are spin-0 bosons that have associated only scalar fields. However, there exist also spin-1 mesons, such as those considered in Proca's equations. The spin-1 vector mesons considered by Proca in 1936—1941 have an odd parity, are involved in electroweak interactions, and have been observed in high-energy experiments only after 1960, whereas the pions predicted by Yukawa's theory were experimentally observed by Carl Anderson in 1937 with masses quite close in value to the 100 MeV predicted by Yukawa's theory of pi-mesons published in 1935; the latter theory considered only the massive scalar field as the cause of the nuclear forces, such as those that would be expected to be found in the field of a pi-meson.
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