(Obituary also posted on May 22, 2008 at The Country .)
Last died on May 15 Willis E. Lamb Jr. at the age of 94 years in Tucson, Arizona. Lamb will be in the history of physics as the discovery of a subtle and fundamental effect associated with the quantum vacuum in the presence of electromagnetic interactions. His work was recognized with the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1955 for his discoveries concerning the fine structure of the hydrogen atom, shared with P. Kusch for his own work in quantum fluctuations.
Born in 1913, Lamb studied chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley, where he received his doctorate in 1934 under the supervision of J. Robert Oppenheimer, later famous for leading the Manhattan Project that led to the pump atomic. His career was developed at Stanford, Yale and Oxford up to the University of Arizona, as a well paid celebrity.
Lamb's great contribution was to perform the experiment that showed the need to review and understand quantum mechanics called quantum fluctuations of vacuum. Thanks to quantum mechanics and work of PAM Dirac, the description of the hydrogen atom seemed well established in the forties. This theory predicts that two specific levels of the atom should have the same energy. In 1947, the very work of Lamb and Retherford RC students demonstrated at Columbia University that such two levels did not have exactly the same energy. The effect was called the "Lamb shift (Lamb shift). The scientific community will focus on the understanding of this fact Weisskopf's hand, Fench, Feynman and Schwinger. Thus was born the concept of virtual particles and quantum fluctuations and the ability to make an incredibly accurate description of the atomic world.
propagation of a particle in the quantum vacuum is thus not elementary. We can imagine a single electron. This electron may remain unchanged, or issue a virtual photon which then capture or issue number, which in turn emit virtual particles ser reabsorbidas. El mundo que observamos tiene en cuenta todas estas posibilidades llamadas fluctuaciones cuánticas.
El experimentó ideado por Lamb dio pie a la incorporación de todos estos efectos virtuales en la
teoría de la Electrodinámica Cuántica.
La mentalidad analítica de Lamb desmenuzaba cada idea y cada proceso. Su forma de trabajo perfeccionista fue acompañada de una absoluta focalización de sus intereses, siempre centrados en el mundo de la ciencia. Fue un físico puro. Lamb no creía que su labor tuviera impacto sobre la vida cotidiana. Sin embargo, sus trabajos dieron lugar al perfeccionamiento de los relojes atómicos. La excelencia de Lamb fue premiada en numerosas ocasiones and should be remembered.
Lamb's disappearance is a symbolic farewell to a brilliant time and it sat in our sound knowledge of the atomic world.
