By Li Han

Staff writer of the Tsinghua News Center

Nobel Prize winner Professor David J. Gross was named a Tsinghua University Honorary Professor on November 12. He also spoke on "The Coming Revolution in Fundamental Physics" in the Tsinghua Global Vision Lectures series.

Tsinghua University Council Vice Chairperson Han Jingyang attended the award ceremony and presented the letter of appointment to Professor Gross.

Professor Gross received his B.Sc. from Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel in 1962 and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1966. He was a Junior Fellow at Harvard University before moving to Princeton University where, in 1973, he was promoted to Professor and later named Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics and Thomas Jones Professor of Mathematical Physics. He became the Director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1997. Gross has been a central figure in the development of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) as the accepted theory of the strong nuclear force. His discovery, with his student Frank Wilczek, of asymptotic freedom led them to the formulation of QCD. Asymptotic freedom is the phenomenon where the force between quarks weakens at short distances, and conversely grows stronger as one tries to separate them, which is why the nucleus of an atom can never be broken into its quark constituents. Gross has also made seminal contributions to Superstring theory. With collaborators, he originated the Heterotic String Theory, the prime candidate for a unified theory of all the forces of nature. In 2004, Gross was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of asymptotic freedom, along with Frank Wilczek and David Politzer.

(Photo by Guo Haijun)