Graham Ross (physicist)

Graham Garland Ross FRS (1944 – 31 October 2021) was a Scottish theoretical physicist who was the Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College.[2][3][4][5]

Graham Ross
Born1944 (1944)
Aberdeen, Scotland[2]
Died31 October 2021(2021-10-31) (aged 76–77)
Alma materUniversity of Aberdeen (BSc)
University of Durham (DPhil)
Awards
Scientific career
Fields
InstitutionsUniversity of Oxford
Doctoral advisorAlan Martin[1]
Doctoral students

Career

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Ross was known for constructing models of fundamental interactions and verifying them by experimentation. With others, while at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva,[6] he predicted that gluon radiation would generate collimated jets of particles in electron–positron annihilation, which subsequently established the existence of the gluon. He made contributions to the foundation of the perturbative treatment of quantum chromodynamics, applying it to high-energy processes and developing connections with the low-energy quark model. He developed predictions of unified models of the fundamental forces for polarised lepton scattering, for sin2θW, for proton decay, and for inflationary cosmology. He discovered that in supersymmetric models, the electroweak symmetry can be broken by quantum effects, and he was among the first researchers to develop models based on this idea.[7]

Personal life

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Ross died suddenly on 31 October 2021.[4]

Awards and honours

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Ross was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1991.[8] In 2012, he was given the Dirac Medal by the Institute of Physics for his theoretical work in developing both the Standard Model of fundamental particles and forces and theories beyond the Standard Model that have led to many new insights into the origins and nature of the universe.[9]

References

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  1. ^ Graham G. Ross at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  2. ^ a b "Graham Ross 1944–2021". CERN Courier. 21 November 2021. Retrieved 9 January 2022.
  3. ^ "Staff profile". UK: Department of Physics, University of Oxford. Retrieved 28 February 2016.
  4. ^ a b "Graham Ross 1944-2021". Wadham College. Archived from the original on 3 November 2021. Retrieved 4 November 2021.
  5. ^ "Theoretical physicist Graham Ross dies". Instituto de Física Corpuscular. 2 November 2021. Retrieved 4 November 2021.
  6. ^ Rimmer, Peggy (June 1975). "Compiler's note". CERN Courier. Retrieved 15 July 2019.
  7. ^ "Graham Ross". London: Royal Society. One or more of the preceding sentences may incorporate text from the royalsociety.org website where "all text published under the heading 'Biography' on Fellow profile pages is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License." "Royal Society Terms, conditions and policies". Archived from the original on 10 July 2017. Retrieved 19 December 2017.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link), "Intellectual property rights"
  8. ^ Graham Ross, The Royal Society
  9. ^ "2012 Dirac medal". Institute of Physics. Archived from the original on 7 March 2016. Retrieved 28 February 2016.