Discovery
Asymptotic freedom was discovered in 1973 by David Gross and Frank Wilczek, and by David Politzer. Although these authors were the first to understand the physical relevance to the strong interactions, in 1969 Iosif Khriplovich discovered asymptotic freedom in the SU(2) gauge theory as a mathematical curiosity, and Gerardus 't Hooft in 1972 also noted the effect but did not publish. For their discovery, Gross, Wilczek and Politzer were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004.
The discovery was instrumental in rehabilitating quantum field theory. Prior to 1973, many theorists suspected that field theory was fundamentally inconsistent because the interactions become infinitely strong at short distances. This phenomenon is usually called a Landau pole, and it defines the smallest length scale that a theory can describe. This problem was discovered in field theories of interacting scalars and spinors, including quantum electrodynamics, and Lehman positivity led many to suspect that it is unavoidable. Asymptotically free theories become weak at short distances, there is no Landau pole, and these quantum field theories are believed to be completely consistent down to any length scale.
While the Standard Model is not entirely asymptotically free, in practice the Landau pole can only be a problem when thinking about the strong interactions. The other interactions are so weak that any inconsistency can only arise at distances shorter than the Planck length, where a field theory description is inadequate anyway.
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Famous quotes containing the word discovery:
“The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Next to the striking of fire and the discovery of the wheel, the greatest triumph of what we call civilization was the domestication of the human male.”
—Max Lerner (b. 1902)
“Your discovery of the contradiction caused me the greatest surprise and, I would almost say, consternation, since it has shaken the basis on which I intended to build my arithmetic.... It is all the more serious since, with the loss of my rule V, not only the foundations of my arithmetic, but also the sole possible foundations of arithmetic seem to vanish.”
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