ajb Posted August 13, 2010 Posted August 13, 2010 Dirac's birthday medal for 2010 has been given to Nicola Cabibbo and Ennackal Chandy George Sudarshan, both have made fundamental advances in our understanding of the weak force. The medal is given out annually by the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP). Nicola Cabibbo (left) and Ennackal Chandy George Sudarshan Cabibbo is recognized for work that explored the significance of "quark-mixing" processes in interactions governed by the weak force. In particular, he established the existence of a new physical constant – now known as the Cabbibo angle – that determines the probability that a strange quark will mix with a non-strange quark, relative to the (much higher) probability of mixing processes where strangeness is conserved. Sudarshan's contributions to the physics of the weak interaction include his discovery of the "V-A theory" of weak interactions. Developed in collaboration with his PhD supervisor Robert Marshak at the University of Rochester in New York, US, Sudarshan's theory was later incorporated into the full, unified theory of electroweak interactions that was developed by Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam and Steven Weinberg in the late 1960s. Sudarshan has also contributed to the theory of quantum optics, and was the first to postulate the existence of faster-than-light particles, known as "tachyons". See the full Institute of Physics report here. The announcement by the ICTP can be found here.
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