Richard Lewis Arnowitt

Richard Lewis Arnowitt, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Texas A&M University, and an internationally renowned figure in High Energy and General Relativity physics, died on June 12, 2014 after a gallant struggle with cancer. He leaves his wife Young-In, sons Michael and Myron and one grandchild. Dick is also survived by his older brother, Edwin, who has begun an endowment for graduate student support in his name at Texas A&M.

In General Relativity Arnowitt is best known for his work with Stanley Deser and Charles Misner on the famous ADM (Arnowitt-Deser-Misner) formalism. In particle theory his most well known work is with Ali Chamseddine and Pran Nath on the development of Supergravity Grand Unification and specifically the mSUGRA model, a tool commonly used in search for new physics beyond the Standard Model.

Dick was born in New York City, May 3, 1928 and grew up there when it was the center of future physicist production. A child prodigy, he finished high school early, going on to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) , where he obtained simultaneous Bachelor’ and Master’s degrees at 20. RPI, the oldest technical institute in the United States, was a Mecca for young scientists during the post-war years, in part due to the proximity of General Electric’s renowned Schenectady research laboratories. Dick arrived at Harvard with his fellow RPI graduate George Benedek, later a professor at MIT. George remembers his RPI/Harvard years with Dick with pleasure, as does one of us (SD), who shared classes, projects and desks with him all four years. Dick’s thesis with Julian Schwinger, on radiative corrections to Hydrogen hyperfine structure, was one of the last of the postwar QED loop calculations. Schwinger mentioned to one of us (MOS) that he always appreciated Dick and felt very warmly toward him. Given Julian’s elevated standards, this is high praise indeed!

After postdoc stints at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory (1952-1954) and the Institute for Advanced Study (1954-1956), Dick joined the Syracuse Faculty (1956-1959). He moved to Northeastern (1959-1986) and in 1986 was called to Texas A&M University where he founded its Center for Theoretical Physics.

Arnowitt’s physics career was illustrious and prolific, with some 333 publications on a wide range of topics. These include his work on General Relativity (GR), a series of some 15 papers, the ADM formulation (1958-1962). It garnered the 1994 Dannie Heineman prize in Mathematical Physics. The ADM definition of GR energy is one of its best-known consequences. ADM remains a standard tool in GR, for example in numerical methods to compute nonlinear gravitational radiation from black hole merger.

With Ali Chamseddine and Pran Nath, Dick Arnowitt was a co-author of Supergravity Grand Unification in 1982 (one of the highly cited (~ 1650) works in particle theory); its simplest version, mSUGRA, is part of the arsenal in the search for new physics at CERN’s LHC. With Marvin Friedman and Nath, he developed the effective Lagrangian method for current algebra analyses, and with Nath, provided a solution to the U(1) problem, i.e., why the 9th pseudo-scalar meson ηʹ is so much heavier than the octet pseudo-scalars. He was a co-author (with Nath and Zumino) of the first local supersymmetry via a superspace formulation, a precursor of Supergravity. Arnowitt’s many other contributions range from future accelerator design to topics in CP violation, Dark Matter and Cosmology in collaboration with Texas A&M colleagues including Bhaskar Dutta and Taruki Kamon.

During his short but fruitful time at Syracuse, Dick and his student Marvin Girardeau developed their highly cited pair theory for many-boson systems. The Girardeau-Arnowitt formalism is particle-number conserving, thus avoiding subtle pitfalls associated with, e.g., a perturbative analysis of the S-matrix.

Arnowitt had a number of PhD students; his teaching impact was further enhanced by countless keynote talks at international conferences and review papers. In recent years, he was a frequent invited lecturer at the Erice school of Subnuclear Physics in Sicily. Dick was an exemplary citizen as well, and contributed to the building up and the welfare of his Physics Departments, as the undersigned can attest. He was a fellow of the American Physical Society and a Guggenheim Fellow (1975-76). His more than six decades of research, teaching and lecture series, as well as his many close friendships with colleagues worldwide will be long remembered.

Submitted by

Stanley Deser, Brandeis and Caltech
Charles Misner, University of Maryland
Pran Nath, Northeastern
Marlan Scully, Texas A&M and Princeton