| Up Eugene Feenberg Medal  |
2009 Eugene Feenberg Award
The International Advisory Committee of the series of International Conferences on Recent Progress in Many-Body Theories is pleased to announce the award of the 2009 Eugene Feenberg Memorial Medal in Many-Body Physics to Professor John Dirk Walecka.
Professor Walecka will receive this Medal for his manysignificant and lasting contributions to many-body and nuclear physics. His early work at Stanford on nucleon resonances, many-body theory,electro-magnetic interactions, and specially his general formulation of electron-nucleus scattering and the development of the one-body density-matrix formalism have profoundly influenced the direction of research in electromagnetic nuclear physics. He was one of the earliest proponents of a high-energy, continuous-wave electron accelerator for nuclear research. He pushed strongly for the construction of the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF), which has now become the world’s leading instrument for high-energy electromagnetic studies of hadrons and nuclei. His formulation of semileptonic weak interactions with nuclei introduced many nuclear theorists and experimentalists to the Standard Model of electroweak interactions. His emphasis on a unified treatment of weak and electromagnetic interactions with nuclei, together with his seminal work on parity-violating processes, helped to define the direction of experimental study in this area and reinforced the connection between theoretical and experimental nuclear physics. Moreover, his development of relativistic meson-baryon field theories for nuclear systems ("quantum hadrodynamics") launched a new field of study in nuclear dynamics. These field theories promotednovel research on relativistic effects in nuclei, high-density nuclear matter, and the application of field-theoretic techniques to the nuclear many-body problem. They also stimulated the development of nucleon-nucleus scattering formalisms based on the Dirac equation, which had remarkable success in explaining (and predicting) medium-energy proton-nucleus scattering data. Professor Walecka’s original ideas on quantum hadrodynamics were more recently given new inspiration when they were reformulated in the context of modern Effective Field Theory and Density Functional Theory. The application of these potent approaches to the nuclear many-body problem will be viable for many years to come.
CITATION:"For theoretical contributions in electroweak interactions with nuclei, the development of relativistic field theories of the nuclear many-body problem and unparalleled achievements in the education of a generation of young nuclear many-body physicists." A more detailed laudatio is available online. This award will be presented to Professor Walecka at the 15th International Conference on Recent Progress in Many-Body Theories, to be held at The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, July 27-31, 2009. See the http://icamconferences.org/rpmbt15-09 for details. |
