Laureate Biography
David Gross joined the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics as its Director and the Physics Department at University of California, Santa Barbara in January 1997. He received his B. Sc in Physics from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1966 and then was a Junior Fellow at Harvard. In 1969 he went to Princeton where he was appointed Professor of Physics in 1972, and later Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics, and Thomas Jones Professor of Mathematical Physics.
Gross has been a central figure in the theoretical developments surrounding the emergence of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) as the accepted theory of the strong (nuclear) force.
His discovery, with his student Frank Wilczek, of asymptotic freedom—the primary feature of non-Abelian gauge theories—led Gross and Wilczek to the formulation of QCD. Asymptotic freedom is a phenomenon where the nuclear force weakens at short distances, which explains why experiments at very high energy can be understood as if nuclear particles are made of non-interacting quarks. The flip side of asymptotic freedom is that the force between quarks grows stronger as one tries to separate them. This is the reason why the nucleus of an atom can never be broken into its quark constituents. Gross was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics, with Politzer and Wilczek, for this discovery.
Gross carried out many of the first phenomenological implications of QCD, which have been extensively confirmed by experiment. His incisive papers on many other aspects of quantum field theory and particle physics have been widely influential. He has made seminal contributions to the theory of Superstrings, where he took a critically inventive role in the explosive development of string theory in the 1980s, a burgeoning enterprise that brings gravity into the quantum framework. With collaborators he originated the "Heterotic String Theory," the prime candidate for a unified theory of all the forces of nature. He continues to do research in this field at the KITP, a world center of physics.
2004 Nobel Prize in Physics
David Gross's Nobel Lecture
2008 Nobelprize.org Interview
David Gross’s lab page
Wikipedia: David Gross