2007 Lise Meitner prize goes to Professor Pierre Ramond

This year the Lise Meitner prize goes to Professor Pierre Ramond for his groundbreaking discoveries in theoretical physics that led to the superstring theory. During the years 1969-71, Ramond, who had then just completed his Ph.D. studies, was working at the National Accelerator Laboratory outside Chicago (later renamed Fermilab). Ramond and a handful of young theoretical physicists had been brought to this newly established laboratory to support experimental physicists in their work. While there, Ramond conducted independent research that laid the foundations for superstring theory. Through studying Paul Dirac's work from 1928 where he formulated the equation describing the wave function of the electron, Ramond succeeded in generalizing the idea to the quantum mechanical description of a string carrying spin.

His work made it possible to construct string theories with both bosonic and fermionic degrees of freedom, necessary for describing elementary particles associated with forces and matter, respectively. A consequence of this formulation was the discovery of a new type of symmetry between these degrees of freedom, later named "Supersymmetry", which was also found to be applicable to ordinary quantum field theories describing ordinary (point-like) particles. This symmetry is now attracting enormous interest and evidence for its existence will be searched for in the new particle accelerator named the "Large Hadron Collider" (LHC) that will start operating this year at CERN.

The award was presented January 25 with a public lecture given by Ramond. The Lise Meitner prize is awarded by the "Fysikcentrum" of Gothenburg, comprised of the physics institutes at Gothenburg University and Chalmers. The prize is given to researchers who under difficult conditions succeed in making groundbreaking discoveries in physics.

Lise Meitner, 1878-1968, was an Austrian-Swedish nuclear physicist. In Berlin, in 1934, she started studying the effects of bombarding Uranium with neutrons. The experiment was conducted by the chemist Otto Hahn, and Meitner formulated the theoretical explanations of the problem. Meitner worked in Berlin until 1938 when, being born of a Jewish family, she was forced to escape and consequently came to Sweden.

In Kungälv she made history. Hahn reported the results of the experiment in Berlin. Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch explained the results. They realized that the atomic nucleus, previously thought to be indivisible, could be split and that a large quantity of energy was emitted in the process, which we now know as "Fission". This conclusion led to a race by many laboratories when the potential for developing nuclear weapons, among other things, was realized. Lise Meitner's contributions were ignored when Otto Hahn received the 1945 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research into fission. Meitner became a Swedish citizen in 1949 and moved to Cambridge in 1960. She died there in 1968.

Above Photo: Pierre Ramond (left) with Professor Bengt Nilsson, who is on the Meitner Prize Committee and a physics professor at Chalmers University.