Jeffrey Goldstone - Biography

Biography

He was educated at Manchester Grammar School and Trinity College, Cambridge, (B.A. 1954, Ph.D. 1958). He worked on the theory of nuclear matter under the guidance of Hans Bethe, and developed modifications of Feynman diagrams for non-relativistic many-fermion systems, which are currently referred to as Goldstone diagrams.

Goldstone was a research fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1956–60 and held visiting research posts at Copenhagen, CERN and Harvard. During this time, his research focus shifted to particle physics and he investigated the nature of relativistic field theories with spontaneously broken symmetries. With Abdus Salam and Steven Weinberg, he proved that in such theories zero-mass particles (Nambu-Goldstone bosons) must exist.

From 1962 to 1976, Goldstone was a faculty member at Cambridge. In the early 1970s, with Peter Goddard, Claudio Rebbi and Charles Thorn, he worked out the light-cone quantization theory of relativistic strings. He moved to the USA in 1977 as Professor of Physics at MIT, where he has been the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics since 1983 and was Director of the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics from 1983-89.

Goldstone published research on solitons in quantum field theory with Roman Jackiw and Frank Wilczek, and on the quantum strong law of large numbers with Edward Farhi and Samuel Gutmann. Since 1997, he has been working, with Farhi, Gutmann, Michael Sipser and Andrew Childs, on quantum computation algorithms.