Gross, David Jonathan (1941-…), an American physicist, won a share of the 2004 Nobel Prize in physics for his research into the force that binds together particles in the nucleus of an atom. Gross shared the prize with the American physicist Frank A. Wilczek, who worked under Gross as a student at the time the research was conducted. A share of the prize was also awarded to the American physicist H. David Politzer, who studied the same topic independently. The three scientists studied the behavior of quarks, tiny particles that make up protons, neutrons, and various other particles. Quarks are attracted to one another by a force called the strong interaction, one of the four fundamental forces of physics. The strong interaction is sometimes called the strong force or strong nuclear force.
In 1973, Gross and Wilczek discovered that the strong interaction had a strange characteristic. Two of the other fundamental forces, gravitation and the electromagnetic force, weaken between two particles as the particles move farther apart. The strong interaction, however, binds quarks more strongly the farther they are separated. The discovery of this characteristic, called asymptotic freedom, enabled the scientists to develop a theory that explained the strong interaction. The theory, which became known as quantum chromodynamics or QCD, describes how particles called gluons transmit the strong interaction between quarks. Gross and Wilczek published their discovery of QCD in 1973. Politzer published his discovery of QCD in 1974.
Gross was born in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 19, 1941. He earned a Ph.D. degree in physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1966. From 1966 to 1969, he conducted research at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He worked as a professor of physics at Princeton University in New Jersey from 1969 to 1997. In 1997, he joined the Institute for Theoretical Physics (now called the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics) at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
