Wilczek, Frank (1951- )

US physicist. With US physicists David Gross and Hugh Politzer he shared the Nobel prize in Physics in 2004 for his contribution to the theoretical explanation of how the strong nuclear force holds quark subatomic particles together.

Wilczek and fellow Nobel laureates, Gross and Politzer, all worked on the same problem, trying to derive a theory to explain the properties of the strong force, also called the colour interaction, one of the four fundamental forces that apply to nature in the microscopic world, according the standard model of particle physics. It was known that the strong interaction held together subatomic articles known as quarks, the building blocks of protons and neutrons, in the nucleus of an atom, but it was not understood why quarks could not be found as discrete particles except in very high energy situations. The standard model could not account for this behaviour. Wilczek and the others discovered that the force between quarks increased with distance, keeping them together the further apart the quarks were, exactly explaining the behaviour seen in particle physics experiments. The discovery was published in two scientific papers in 1971 and formed the basis of the theory of colour interaction known as quantum chromodynamics (QCD). This work allowed the standard model theory to be completed.

Wilczek was born in New York City. He received his MA in mathematics from Princeton University, New Jersey in 1972 and a PhD in physics from that institution in 1974. He joined Princeton as an instructor and associate professor in 1974 and was appointed a full professor in 1980. From 1980 to 1988 Wilczek was a professor and member of the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. From 1989 until 2000 he was professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at the School of Natural Sciences at Princeton. From 2000 he held the position of professor at the department of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was elected member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1990 and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1993. In 2000, he was elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.