Wilczek, Frank

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US physicist. With US physicists David Gross and Hugh Politzer he shared the Nobel prize in Physics in 2004 for his contribution to the theoretical explanation of how the strong nuclear force holds quark subatomic particles together.

Wilczek and fellow Nobel laureates, Gross and Politzer, all worked on the same problem, trying to derive a theory to explain the properties of the strong force, also called the colour interaction, one of the four fundamental forces that apply to nature in the microscopic world, according the standard model of particle physics. It was known that the strong interaction held together subatomic articles known as quarks, the building blocks of protons and neutrons, in the nucleus of an atom, but it was not understood why quarks could not be found as discrete particles except in very high energy situations. The standard model could not account for this behaviour. Wilczek and the others discovered that the force between quarks increased with distance, keeping them together the further apart the quarks were, exactly explaining the behaviour seen in particle physics experiments. The discovery was published in two scientific papers in 1971 and formed the basis of the theory of colour interaction known as quantum chromodynamics (QCD). This work allowed the standard model theory to be completed.

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