Roman Wladimir Jackiw (; ; November 8, 1939 – June 14, 2023) was an American theoretical physicist and Dirac Medallist.
Early life and education Jackiw was born in Lubliniec, Poland, in 1939 to a Ukrainian family that moved to Austria and Germany before settling in New York City when Jackiw was about 10.Oral History Transcript — Dr. Roman Jackiw American Institute of Physics (5 August 2010)
Jackiw earned his undergraduate degree from Swarthmore College and his PhD from Cornell University in 1966 under Hans Bethe and Kenneth Wilson. He was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Theoretical Physics from 1969 until his retirement. He retained his affiliation in emeritus status in 2019.
Career Jackiw co-discovered the chiral anomaly, which is also known as the Adler–Bell–Jackiw anomaly. In 1969, he and John Stewart Bell published their explanation, later expanded and clarified by Stephen L. Adler, of the observed decay of a neutral pion into two photons. This decay is forbidden by a symmetry of classical electrodynamics, but Bell and Jackiw showed that this symmetry is not preserved at the quantum level. Their introduction of an "anomalous" term from quantum field theory required that the sum of the charges of the elementary fermions be zero. This work also gave important support to the color theory of quarks.
Jackiw is also known for Jackiw–Teitelboim gravity, often abbreviated as JT Gravity, a theory of gravity with one dimension each of space and time that includes a dilaton field. Sometimes known as the R = T model, it is used to model some aspects of near-extremal black holes.
Personal life
Jackiw married fellow physicist So-Young Pi, daughter of Korean writer Pi Chun-deuk. Jackiw's sons are the violinst Stefan Jackiw and Nicholas Jackiw, a software designer known for inventing The Geometer's Sketchpad. His daughter, Simone Ahlborn, is an educator at Moses Brown School in Providence, Rhode Island.
Jackiw died on 14 June 2023, aged 83.
Awards Heineman Prize, 1995 Honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Science and Technology at Uppsala University, 2000
Notes
References
External links
MIT web page for Roman Jackiw Dirac Medal website's description of Jackiw's 1998 prize Biography of John Bell, including description of his 1969 work with Jackiw