Fritzsch to receive University of South Wales Dirac medal

The Silver Dirac Medal for the Advancement of Theoretical Physics is awarded by the University of New South Wales on the occasion of the Public Dirac Lecture. The Lecture and the Medal commemorate the visit to the University in 1975 of Professor P.A.M. Dirac, one of the greatest theoretical physicists of the century. Professor Dirac gave five lectures at the University, which were subsequently published as a book Directions of Physics (Wiley, 1978 - H. Hora and J. Shepanski, eds.). Professor Dirac kindly donated the royalties from this book to the University for the establishment of the Dirac Lecture series.

Harald Fritzsch is the 17th recipient of the Dirac medal and will speak on the 15 April 2008 at the University of New South Wales on the fundamental constants in physics, and the advantages of quantum optic experiments in understanding the values of these constants.

Harald Fritzsch was born and raised near Zwickau in East Germany. He studied physics at the University of Leipzig and was a member of a group of students and scientists that opposed the communist government. In 1968 he was forced to escape from East Germany and settled in Munich, where he became a graduate student at the MPI. In 1971 he obtained his Ph.D. at the Technical University in Munich.

As a graduate student he started a lifelong collaboration with Murray Gell-Mann at Caltech. After becoming professor at the Universities of Wuppertal in Germany and Bern in Switzerland, he obtained in 1980 the Sommerfeld Chair for Physics at the University of Munich.

In 1972 Fritzsch and Gell-Mann wrote the first paper on the gauge theory of the strong interactions, which they later named Quantum Chromodynamics. For the past 35 years he has worked on this theory and investigated many of its features, including scaling violations and the spin problem.

In 1975 Fritzsch proposed together with Minkowski the SO(10)-theory of Grand Unification, which is today the outstanding candidate for a unified theory. He has published many papers on features of the weak interactions and proposed the so-called Fritzsch matrices to describe the flavour mixing. He has recently applied these ideas to lepton mixing and neutrino oscillations.

Fritzsch has written several successful general books on particle physics, cosmology, relativity theory and fundamental constants, which have been translated into many languages.

He received the Medal for science publishing of the German Physical Society in 1994, and is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Science .