George Zweig
| George Zweig | |
|---|---|
George Zweig giving a speech at Department of Physics, National Taiwan University
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| Born |
May 30, 1937 Moscow, Russian SFSR |
| Citizenship | American |
| Fields | physics; neurobiology |
| Institutions | LANL, MIT |
| Alma mater | University of Michigan, California Institute of Technology |
| Doctoral advisor | Richard Feynman |
| Notable awards | Sakurai Prize (2015), MacArthur Fellowship 1981, NAS 1996 |
George Zweig (born May 30, 1937) is a Russian-American physicist. He was trained as a particle physicist under Richard Feynman. He introduced, independently of Murray Gell-Mann, the quark model (although he named it "aces"). He later turned his attention to neurobiology. He has worked as a Research Scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and MIT, and in the financial services industry.
Zweig was born in Moscow, Russia into a Jewish family. His father was a type of civil engineer known as a structural engineer. He graduated from the University of Michigan in 1959, with a bachelor's degree in mathematics, having taken numerous physics courses as electives. He earned a PhD degree in theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology in 1964.
Zweig proposed the existence of quarks at CERN, independently of Murray Gell-Mann, right after defending his PhD dissertation. Zweig dubbed them "aces", after the four playing cards, because he speculated there were four of them (on the basis of the four extant leptons known at the time). The introduction of quarks provided a cornerstone for particle physics.
Like Gell-Mann, he realized that several important properties of particles such as baryons (e.g., protons and neutrons) could be explained by treating them as triplets of other constituent particles (which he called aces and Gell-Mann called quarks), with fractional baryon number and electric charge. Unlike Gell-Mann, Zweig was partly led to his picture of the quark model by the peculiarly attenuated decays of the φ meson to ρ π, a feature codified by what is now known as the OZI Rule, the "Z" in which stands for "Zweig". In subsequent technical terminology, ultimately Gell-Mann's quarks were closer to "current quarks", while Zweig's to "constituent quarks".
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