Benjamin W. Lee
Encyclopedia
Benjamin Whisoh Lee (January 1, 1935 - June 16, 1977) or Ben Lee, was a Korean-American theoretical physicist. His work in theoretical particle physics exerted great influence on the development of the standard model
Standard Model
The Standard Model of particle physics is a theory concerning the electromagnetic, weak, and strong nuclear interactions, which mediate the dynamics of the known subatomic particles. Developed throughout the mid to late 20th century, the current formulation was finalized in the mid 1970s upon...

 in the late 20th century especially on the renormalization
Renormalization
In quantum field theory, the statistical mechanics of fields, and the theory of self-similar geometric structures, renormalization is any of a collection of techniques used to treat infinities arising in calculated quantities....

 of elecro-weak model and the gauge theory
Gauge theory
In physics, gauge invariance is the property of a field theory in which different configurations of the underlying fundamental but unobservable fields result in identical observable quantities. A theory with such a property is called a gauge theory...

.

Biography

Lee was born in Yongsan
Yongsan-gu
Yongsan-gu is a district of Seoul, South Korea. Its name means "Dragon Hill", derived from the hanja characters for dragon and hill/mountain . It sits to the North of the Han River under the shadow of Seoul Tower. Geographically, it is located right in the center of Seoul. It is home to roughly...

, Seoul
Seoul
Seoul , officially the Seoul Special City, is the capital and largest metropolis of South Korea. A megacity with a population of over 10 million, it is the largest city proper in the OECD developed world...

. Before graduating Kyunggi High School
Kyunggi High School
Kyunggi High School is the oldest modern secondary school in Korea, and has educated many leaders of South Korean society. Before the abolition of high-school entrance exams, it was the highest-ranked school in the country. It is located in Gangnam-gu, Seoul, today one of South Korea's most...

, he entered the department of chemical engineering at Seoul National University
Seoul National University
Seoul National University , colloquially known in Korean as Seoul-dae , is a national research university in Seoul, Korea, ranked 24th in the world in publications in an analysis of data from the Science Citation Index, 7th in Asia and 42nd in the world by the 2011 QS World University Rankings...

 at the top of his class. While in college he emigrated to the United States and graduated with a bachelor's degree at Miami University
Miami University
Miami University is a coeducational public research university located in Oxford, Ohio, United States. Founded in 1809, it is the 10th oldest public university in the United States and the second oldest university in Ohio, founded four years after Ohio University. In its 2012 edition, U.S...

, a master's at the University of Pittsburgh
University of Pittsburgh
The University of Pittsburgh, commonly referred to as Pitt, is a state-related research university located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. Founded as Pittsburgh Academy in 1787 on what was then the American frontier, Pitt is one of the oldest continuously chartered institutions of...

, and a Ph.D. at University of Pennsylvania
University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania is a private, Ivy League university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States,Penn is the fourth-oldest using the founding dates claimed by each institution...

 by age 25. Lee worked at Institute for Advanced Study
Institute for Advanced Study
The Institute for Advanced Study, located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States, is an independent postgraduate center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. It was founded in 1930 by Abraham Flexner...

 and was a professor of physics
Physics
Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...

 at University of Pennsylvania
University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania is a private, Ivy League university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States,Penn is the fourth-oldest using the founding dates claimed by each institution...

, SUNY at Stony Brook, University of Chicago
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...

, and head of the theoretical physics department at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
Fermilab
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory , located just outside Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago, is a US Department of Energy national laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics...

. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...

 in 1976. On June 16, 1977, he was killed in a car accident
Car accident
A traffic collision, also known as a traffic accident, motor vehicle collision, motor vehicle accident, car accident, automobile accident, Road Traffic Collision or car crash, occurs when a vehicle collides with another vehicle, pedestrian, animal, road debris, or other stationary obstruction,...

 not far from Kewanee
Kewanee
Kewanee is the name of several places in the United States:*Kewanee, Illinois, a city in Henry County*Kewanee, Mississippi, a location in Mississippi*Kewanee, Missouri, an unincorporated community in New Madrid County...

, Illinois
Illinois
Illinois is the fifth-most populous state of the United States of America, and is often noted for being a microcosm of the entire country. With Chicago in the northeast, small industrial cities and great agricultural productivity in central and northern Illinois, and natural resources like coal,...

 (on the Interstate 80
Interstate 80
Interstate 80 is the second-longest Interstate Highway in the United States, following Interstate 90. It is a transcontinental artery running from downtown San Francisco, California to Teaneck, New Jersey in the New York City Metropolitan Area...

). Lee was regarded by his peers as a world-class elementary particle physicist at the time of his sudden death.
He studied gauge theory and weak interactions.

Gauge theory

In 1964, Lee published an article about spontaneous symmetry breaking
Spontaneous symmetry breaking
Spontaneous symmetry breaking is the process by which a system described in a theoretically symmetrical way ends up in an apparently asymmetric state....

 with his advisor Abraham Klein
Abraham Klein (physicist)
Abraham Klein was an American theoretical physicist.Klein studied at Brooklyn College and at Harvard University, where he made his 1948 master's degree and doctorate in 1950 under Julian Schwinger.In 1955 he became associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a full...

 and contributed to the appearance of Higgs mechanism
Higgs mechanism
In particle physics, the Higgs mechanism is the process in which gauge bosons in a gauge theory can acquire non-vanishing masses through absorption of Nambu-Goldstone bosons arising in spontaneous symmetry breaking....

.
He is often credited with the naming of the Higgs boson
Higgs boson
The Higgs boson is a hypothetical massive elementary particle that is predicted to exist by the Standard Model of particle physics. Its existence is postulated as a means of resolving inconsistencies in the Standard Model...

 and Higgs mechanism.
And in 1969, he succeeded individually the renormalization of the spontaneously breaking global gauge symmetry model. In the mean time, Dutch
Dutch people
The Dutch people are an ethnic group native to the Netherlands. They share a common culture and speak the Dutch language. Dutch people and their descendants are found in migrant communities worldwide, notably in Suriname, Chile, Brazil, Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, and the United...

 graduate student Gerardus 't Hooft
Gerardus 't Hooft
Gerardus 't Hooft is a Dutch theoretical physicist and professor at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. He shared the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics with his thesis advisor Martinus J. G...

 was working in the case of local gauge symmetry breaking in the Yang-Mills theory using the Higgs mechanism. He met Lee and Symanzik
Kurt Symanzik
Kurt Symanzik was a German physicist working in quantum field theory.- Life :Symanzik was born in Lyck , East Prussia, and spent his childhood in Königsberg. He started studying physics in 1946 at Universität München but after a short time moved to Werner Heisenberg at Göttingen...

 at the Cargèse Summer School and consulted them on his work and got an insight. He finally succeeded in the renormalization of non-abelian gauge theory and wins the Nobel Prize later for this archive. David Politzer said in his 2004 Nobel Lecture that the particle physicists community at that time learned all from Lee who actually combined insights from his own work and from Russian physicists' work and encouraged 't Hooft's paper.

Charm quark

Glashow
Sheldon Lee Glashow
Sheldon Lee Glashow is a Nobel Prize winning American theoretical physicist. He is the Metcalf Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Boston University.-Birth and education:...

, Maiani
Luciano Maiani
Luciano Maiani is a San Marino citizen physicist best known for his prediction of the charm quark with Sheldon Lee Glashow and John Iliopoulos .-Academic history:...

 and Iliopoulos
John Iliopoulos
John Iliopoulos is a Greek physicist and the first person to present the Standard Model of particle physics in a single report. He is best known for his prediction of the charm quark with Sheldon Lee Glashow and Luciano Maiani...

 predicted charm quarks to match the experimental results. Lee wrote an article with Gaillard and Rosner and predicted the mass of the charm quarks by calculating the quantities which correspond to the mixing and decay of K meson.

Cosmology

In 1977, Lee and Weinberg
Steven Weinberg
Steven Weinberg is an American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in Physics for his contributions with Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow to the unification of the weak force and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles....

 wrote an article about the lower bound on heavy neutrino
Neutrino
A neutrino is an electrically neutral, weakly interacting elementary subatomic particle with a half-integer spin, chirality and a disputed but small non-zero mass. It is able to pass through ordinary matter almost unaffected...

 mass.
In this paper, they revealed that if the heavy and stable particles in the early universe which can only be transferred into other particles through the pair annihilation remain as relics after the universe's expansion, then the strength of the interaction should be bigger than 2 GeV. This calculation can be applied to find the amount of the dark matter
Dark matter
In astronomy and cosmology, dark matter is matter that neither emits nor scatters light or other electromagnetic radiation, and so cannot be directly detected via optical or radio astronomy...

. This bound is called the Lee-Weinberg bound
Light dark matter
In astronomy and cosmology, light dark matter refers to dark matter Weakly interacting massive particle candidates with masses less than 1 GeV. These particles are heavier than warm dark matter and hot dark matter, but are lighter than the traditional forms of cold dark matter...

.

Controversy over death

In Korea, there was a novel of him with incorrect information about his academic subject and political affiliation. That fiction described that he tried to help South Korea's dictatorship develop nuclear weapons and intended to make some relation between his death and CIA. But rather he opposed vigorously the autocratic system of South Korea at that time
Third Republic of South Korea
The Third Republic of South Korea was the government of South Korea from 1963 to 1972. It was presented as a return to civilian rule after a period of rule by the military junta known as the Supreme Council for National Reconstruction which had overthrown the Second Republic of South Korea in 1961...

 and he canceled every program he designed for Korean graduate education about particle physics in opposition to that government.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK