2004 Ta-You Wu Lecturer - David J. Gross

David J. Gross, the recently announced 2004 Nobel laureate in physics, presented the 2004 Ta-You Wu Lecture in Physics. Professor Gross joined the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics and the Physics Department at University of California, Santa Barbara in January 1997. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1966 and then was a Junior Fellow at Harvard. In 1969, he went to Princeton where he was appointed Professor of Physics (1972), and later Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics, and Thomas Jones Professor of Mathematical Physics.

Professor Gross was an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow (1970-74), elected Fellow of the American Physical Society (1974), Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1985), Member of the National Academy of Sciences (1986), and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1987). He is the Recipient of the J. J. Sakurai Prize of the American Physical Society (1986), a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship Prize (1987), the Dirac Medal (1988), the Oscar Klein Medal (2000), the Harvey Prize of the Technion (2000), the High Energy and Particle Physics Prize of the European Physical Society (2003), and the Grand Gold Medal from the French Academy of Sciences (2004). He has received two honorary degrees.

Gross has been a central figure in the theoretical developments surrounding the emergence of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) as the accepted theory of the strong (nuclear) force. His discovery, with his student Frank Wilczek, of asymptotic freedom—the primary feature of non-Abelian gauge theories—was crucial to the formulation of QCD. Asymptotic freedom is a phenomenon where the nuclear force weakens at short distances, which explains why experiments at very high energy can be understood as if nuclear particles are made of non-interacting quarks. The flip side of asymptotic freedom is that the force between quarks grows stronger as one tries to separate them. This is the reason why the nucleus of an atom can never be broken into its quark constituents.

Gross (with Wilczek and others) carried out many of the first phenomenological implications of QCD, which have been extensively confirmed by experiment. His incisive papers on many other aspects of quantum field theory and particle physics have been widely influential.

He has made seminal contributions to the theory of Superstrings, where he took a critically inventive role in the explosive development of string theory in the 1980s, a burgeoning enterprise that brings gravity into the quantum framework. With collaborators he originated the “Heterotic String Theory,” an important ingredient in a unified theory of all the forces of nature. He continues to do research in this field at the KITP, a world center of string theory.

Professor Gross presented the Ta-You Wu lecture, "Asymptotic Freedom and the Emergence of QCD (Or How I Won the Nobel Prize)"