Career
In 1927 Stueckelberg got his Ph. D. at the University of Basel under August Hagenbach. He qualified as a university lecturer together with Konrad Bleuler under supervision from Gregor Wentzel at the University of Zürich.
In 1934 he devised a fully covariant perturbation theory for quantum fields. To quote this paper, "The approach proposed by Stueckelberg was far more powerful, but was not adopted by others at the time". Now, despite its benefits, this approach has been all but forgotten. However, besides being explicitly covariant, Stueckelberg's methods avoid vacuum bubbles. See also here.
Independently from Hideki Yukawa, he gave vector boson exchange as the theoretical explanation of the strong nuclear force in 1935.
In 1938 he recognized that massive electrodynamics contains a hidden scalar, and formulated an affine version of what would become known as the Abelian Higgs mechanism.
He proposed the law of conservation of baryon number.
The evolution parameter theory he presented in 1941 and 1942 is the basis for recent work in relativistic dynamics.
In 1941 he proposed the interpretation of the positron as a positive energy electron traveling backward in time.
In 1943 he came up with a renormalization program to attack the problems of infinities in quantum electrodynamics (QED), but his paper was rejected by the Physical Review.
In 1953 he and the mathematician Andre Petermann discovered the renormalization group.
In 1976 he was awarded the Max Planck medal.
His PhD students included Marcel Guenin.
Read more about this topic: Ernst Stueckelberg
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