Pomeranchuk Prize Winners 2005

According to the decision of the International Pomeranchuk Prize Committee the Pomeranchuk Prize for 2005 is awarded to J.B.Khriplovich (INP, Novosibirsk, Russia) and A.Vainshtein (University of Minnesota, USA).

The Prize is awarded for outstanding contribution to the understanding the properties of the Standart Model, especially for illuminating work on weak and strong interaction of quarks.

The present knowledge of the Standard Model and of the dynamics of quarks has fundamental elements originating in the works of the Laureats, done by them both collaboratively and individually.

Their paper on what today is called the box diagrams (A. I. Vainshtein and I. B. Khriplovich, Zh. Eksp. Teor. Fiz. Pis'ma Red. 18, 141 (1973); [JETP Lett. 18, 83 (1973)]) was in fact the first to make a quantitative calculation of FCNC processes based on the GIM mechanism. Their calculation was entirely new and highly non trivial at that time. Besides the concrete practical result of the paper, which gave an upper bound on the charmed quark mass, their calculation in fact created a new method of quantitative analyses of FCNC processes. The present understanding of the B-Bbar mixing, including the recently observed CP violation, is entirely based on calculations of box graphs, that actually are direct descendants of the above mentioned paper.

Other important results, obtained by them together, include the analysis of the transition from a massive to massless behavior in Yang-Mills theories (1971) and the analysis of CP violation in ordinary light hadrons in the Standard Model (1994).

J.B.Khriplovich is Professor of Physics, Corresponding Member of Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS). He is the author of the books: "Parity Nonconservation in Atomic Phenomena"(1981), "CP Violation without Strangeness. Electric Dipole Moments of Particles, Atoms, and Molecules" (1997, with S.K.Lamoreaux) and "General Relativity"(2002).

Josif Khriplovich was the first to correctly calculate the beta function for the coupling renormalization in a non-Abelian Yang-Mills theory. By that time (1969) the necessity of the asymptotic freedom, however, was not realized.

Starting from early 70-s he was among the initiators of the search for parity violating effects in atoms, and he has performed a great number of pioneering detailed calculations of the effect in various atoms, including the effect of the rotation of polarization of light in bismuth, which was the first experimentally observed (Barkov, Zolotorev, 1978) effect of atomic parity violation.

Arkadii Vainshtein is Professor of Physics and Member of William I.Fine Theoretical Physics Institute University of Minnesota. In 1999 he received the J.J.Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics of American Physical Society. He is the author of the book "Theory of the Muon Anomalous Magnetic Moment" (2006, together with K.Melnikov).

The results of Arkadii Vainshtein relevant to the established phenomenology of hadrons are quite famous. Among them are the invention of the so-called "penguin" mechanism, the famous QCD sum rules, and profound advances in understanding non-perturbative properties of the QCD vacuum, calculation of higher twist effects in the deep inelastic scattering, calculation of non-perturbative effects in weak decays of heavy hadrons.