Wilczek, Frank Anthony (1951-…), 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. Wilczek shared the prize with the American physicist David J. Gross, who was Wilczek’s professor 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, Wilczek and Gross 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. Wilczek and Gross published their discovery of QCD in 1973. Politzer published his discovery of QCD in 1974.
Wilczek was born on May 15, 1951, in Mineola, New York. He attended Princeton University in New Jersey, where he earned an M.A. degree in mathematics in 1972 and a Ph.D. degree in physics in 1975. He worked as a professor at Princeton University from 1974 to 1981. From 1981 to 1988, he taught and conducted research at the Institute for Theoretical Physics (now called the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics) at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He joined the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1989. In 2000, he became a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. In 2022, Wilczek received the Templeton Prize for his contributions to theoretical physics.
See also Force (The strong force); Gluon; Quark; Subatomic particle (The Standard Model).
