Clasine van Winter Memorial Lecture in Mathematical Physics

“Revisiting some old observations about QCD”

Profesor Clifford H. Taubes

Harvard University

Monday, November 18, 2002

4:00 PM

Room 155,

Chemistry-Physics Building

University of Kentucky Campus

Abstract

I explain how some extensions of observations about the instability of the Coulomb solution in classical QCD can hint at the nature of the large coupling forces between quarks. In particular, I will describe some of the surprising properties of the electric and magnetic fields for a minimum energy classical solution for a non-abelian gauge theory in the presence of a point charge.

Clifford Taubes is William Petschek Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University. He received his Ph. D. in Physics from Harvard University in 1980. He was a John Parker Fellow at Harvard from 1979 to 1980, a Junior Fellow at Harvard from 1980 to 1983, and held a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship from 1983 to 1986. He held an associate professorship at the University of California at Berkeley before returning to Harvard as a Professor in 1985. He is a member of the American Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is also a member of the National Science Foundation’s Mathematical Sciences Advisory Committee.

The inaugural lecture in the van Winter series was given in the fall of 2001 by Professor Elliott Lieb of Princeton University.