Early scientific days of Ludwik Turko

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arly Scientific Days of Ludwik Turko1 Jerzy Lukierski Uniwersytet Wro l awski, Instytut Fizyki Teoretycznej, pl. M. Borna 9, 50204, Wroc l aw, Poland email: [email protected] Abstract—I shall describe briefly the first ten years of Ludwik Turko’s scientific activities—from his arrival to Wroclaw in 1967 through PhD studies (1967–1971) until the end of the 1970s. DOI: 10.1134/S1063779615050184 1

The sixties of previous century was definitely a good time for theoretical physics at Wroclaw Univer sity. After the foundation in 1960 of the Institute for Theoretical Physics this research unit was expanding quite remarkably. At that time from Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton and New York Univer sity came back Jan Lopuszanski, who brought the lat est research news in mathematical physics and field theory. The first director of the Institute, Jan Rze wuski, did spend one year in Dubna during the early 1960s and then one year at CERN in Geneva. New generation was quickly gaining knowledge—in partic ular Jerzy Czerwonko and myself, we both born in 1936, obtained master degrees in physics in 1956 at the age of twenty. At the middle of sixties the group of the oretical physicists at Wroclaw University was already wellknown in Polish scientific community of physi cists and attracted the students from other universities, interested in continuation of their studies at postgrad uate level in Wroclaw. Ludwik completed his studies in 1966 at Lodz Uni versity, and after one year of stay there as an assistant, he moved in autumn 1967 with his wife Bogda, a charming mathematician, to Wroclaw, in order to join just opened PhD studies in theoretical physics. At that time I sup pose he was not aware that his personal and scientific life will be linked for almost fifty years with this new town in Poland located on the banks of Odra river. Contrary to recent habits at that time the PhD stu dents were not attached from the beginning to definite supervisor—during first year of studies they could observe their older collegues and asked the chosen one for supervising future PhD. Ludwik asked me quite soon if I have a problem with good prospects as the theme of PhD thesis. At that time I was studying some simple, even soluble fieldtheoretic models, in partic ular the nonrelativistic fieldtheoretic model proposed by T.D. Lee in 1954 [1] and the relativistic soluble model due to Zachariasen [2], describing in fieldthe oretic way the elastic scattering sector. Independently

1 The article is published in the original.

I was at that time interested also in socalled general ized free fields, introduced in 1965 by Licht [3], which were characterized by continuous mass spectrum replacing the constant mass parameter for standard free KleinGordon fields. Related problem which I did study also at that time was the incorporation of generalized free fields into generalization of socalled LSZ (LehmannSymanzikZimmermann) frame work for interacting relativistic quantum fields [4, 5], with standard and generalize