Tai Tsun Wu

{{Infobox scientist

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| name = Tai Tsun Wu

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| birth_date = {{birth date |1933|12|1}}

| birth_place = Shanghai, Republic of China

| death_date = {{death date and age |2024|07|19 |1933|12|1}}

| death_place = Palo Alto, California, U.S.

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| fields = Physics

| workplaces = Harvard University

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University of Minnesota (BS)
Harvard University (MS, PhD)

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| thesis_title = I. The Concept of Impedance II. High Frequency Scattering

| thesis_url = https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/i-concept-impedance-ii-high-frequency-scattering/docview/301948978/se-2?accountid=210906

| thesis_year = 1956

| doctoral_advisor = Ronold W. P. King

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| spouse = Sau Lan Wu

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Tai Tsun Wu ({{zh|t=吳大峻|s=吴大峻|p=Wú Dàjùn}}, December 1, 1933 – July 19, 2024) was a Chinese-born American physicist and writer well known for his contributions to high-energy nuclear physics and statistical mechanics. He was married to experimental physicist Sau Lan Wu.

Life

Born in Shanghai, he studied electrical engineering at University of Minnesota and became a William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition fellow (1953).{{cite web |title=Putnam Competition Individual and Team Winners |url=http://www.maa.org/programs/maa-awards/putnam-competition-individual-and-team-winners |publisher=Mathematical Association of America |access-date=December 10, 2021 |archive-date=March 12, 2014 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140312205244/http://www.maa.org/programs/maa-awards/putnam-competition-individual-and-team-winners |url-status=dead }} He obtained an S.M. (1954) and Ph.D. (1956) in applied physics from Harvard University.

His thesis concerned I. The Concept of Impedance II. High Frequency Scattering and was advised by Ronold W. P. King.{{MathGenealogy|18846}}

At Harvard, he continued as Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows (1956–59), joined the faculty of applied physics (1959) and was the Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics & Professor of Physics.

Wu has also had visiting appointments with Rockefeller University (1966), at the DESY in Hamburg, Germany (1971), at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland and Utrecht University (1977).

He has studied statistical mechanics on Bose–Einstein condensation in an external potential, classical electromagnetic theory

(1960). With Hung Cheng, he used gauge quantum field theory to predict the unboundedly increasing total scattering cross sections at very high energies, experimentally verified at CERN and Tevatron collider. Wu studied production processes for the Large Hadron Collider, in particular to predict the production cross section of a Higgs particle with low momentum together with two forward jets.

His studies with Chen Ning Yang include CP violation, globalization of the gauge theory,{{Cite journal|first1=T. T. |last1=Wu |first2=C. N. |last2=Yang |year=1975 |title=Concept of non-integrable phase factors and global formulation of gauge fields|journal=Phys. Rev. D |volume=12|issue=12 |pages=3845–3857 |doi=10.1103/PhysRevD.12.3845|bibcode = 1975PhRvD..12.3845W }} and the Wu–Yang dictionary. More recently, Wu has studied quantum information processing based on the Schrödinger equation without any spatial dimension in the modeling and application of quantum memories.[http://www.physics.harvard.edu/people/facpages/wu.html homepage] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120406135634/http://www.physics.harvard.edu/people/facpages/wu.html |date=2012-04-06 }} at Harvard University He published his last research paper on [https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/10.1142/S0217751X23501282 Concept of the basic standard model and a relation between the three gauge coupling constants] at the age of 90 along with his wife Sau Lan Wu. He died on July 19, 2024 at the Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto, California.{{cite news|url=https://www.physics.harvard.edu/news/tai-tsun-wu-1933-2024|title=Tai Tsun Wu (1933-2024)|work=Harvard University Department of Physics|date=July 23, 2024}}

Honours and awards

Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1977
Academician of Academia Sinica, Taiwan, 1980
The Humboldt Prize, 1985
Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics with Barry M. McCoy and Alexander Zamolodchikov, 1999{{cite journal|title=People: 1999 American Physical Society Prizes and Awards|journal=CERN Courier|date=March 1999|volume=39|issue=2|page=35|url=https://cds.cern.ch/record/1732916}}

Books

The Scattering and Diffraction of Waves (Harvard University Press, 1959). With Ronold W. P. King.
The two-dimensional Ising model (Harvard University Press, 1973). With Barry M. McCoy
Antennas in Matter: Fundamentals, Theory, and Applications (with R. W. P. King, G. S. Smith, and M. Owens), M.I.T. Press, 1981.
Expanding Protons: Scattering at High Energies (MIT Press, 1987). With Hung Cheng
The Ubiquitous Photon: Helicity Methods for QED and QCD (Oxford University Press, 1990). With Raymond Gastmans
Lateral Electromagnetic Waves: Theory and Applications to Communications, Geophysical Exploration, and Remote Sensing (Springer-Verlag, 1992). With Ronold W. P. King and Margaret Owens