Léon Rosenfeld

Léon Rosenfeld (French: [ʁɔzɛnfɛld]; 14 August 1904 in Charleroi – 23 March 1974^[1]) was a Belgian physicist and a communist activist.

Léon Rosenfeld
Rosenfeld in 1963
Born	14 August 1904 Charleroi, Belgium
Died	March 23, 1974(1974-03-23) (aged 69)
Citizenship	Belgium
Alma mater	University of Liège (PhD, 1926)
Known for	Belinfante–Rosenfeld stress–energy tensor, coined the term lepton
Spouse	Yvonne Cambresier
Children	Andrée, Jean
Awards	Francqui Prize (1949)
Signature

Rosenfeld was born into a secular Jewish family. He was a polyglot who knew eight or nine languages and was fluent in at least five of them.^[2]

Rosenfeld obtained a PhD at the University of Liège in 1926, and he was a close collaborator of the physicist Niels Bohr from 1930 until Bohr's death in 1962.^[3] Rosenfeld published in 1930 the first systematic Hamiltonian approach to Lagrangian models that possess a local gauge symmetry, which predates by two decades the work by Paul Dirac and Peter Bergmann.^[4] Rosenfeld contributed to a wide range of physics fields, from statistical physics and quantum field theory to astrophysics.^[2] Along with Frederik Belinfante, he derived the Belinfante–Rosenfeld stress–energy tensor. He also founded the journal Nuclear Physics and coined the term lepton.^[5]

In 1933, Rosenfeld married Yvonne Cambresier, who was one of the first women to obtain a Physics PhD from a European university. They had a daughter, Andrée Rosenfeld (1934–2008) and a son, Jean Rosenfeld.^[6]

Awards and honors

Rosenfeld held chairs at multiple universities: Liège, Utrecht, Manchester, and Copenhagen.^[2]

In 1949 Léon Rosenfeld was awarded the Francqui Prize for Exact Sciences.^[2]

Works

• Rosenfeld, Léon (1948). Nuclear Forces. North-Holland.
• Rosenfeld, Léon (1951). Theory Of Electrons. North-Holland.
• Bohr, Niels; Rosenfeld, Léon (1933). "Zur Frage der Messbarkeit der elektromagnetischen Feldgrössen" [On the Question of the Measurability of Electromagnetic Field Quantities]. Royal_Danish_Academy_of_Sciences_and_Letters (in German): 123–166 – via Translated from German (1996) Niels Bohr Collected Works. Vol. 7. North–Holland: Amsterdam. Demonstrated the logical consistency of quantum electrodynamics.

References

1. Léon Rosenfeld's Marxist defense of complementarity, by Anja Skaar Jacobsen "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 17 July 2011. Retrieved 17 July 2011.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
2. Jacobsen, Anja Skaar (2012). Léon Rosenfeld: Physics, Philosophy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century. doi:10.1142/7776. ISBN 978-981-4307-81-9.
3. "Obituary. Léon Rosenfeld" (PDF). Nature. 251: 86. 6 September 1974. doi:10.1038/251086a0.
4. Leon Rosenfeld and the challenge of the vanishing momentum in quantum electrodynamics, by Donald Salisbury
5. Rosenfeld, Léon (1948). Nuclear Forces. Interscience Publishers, New York, xvii.
6. Smith, Claire. "Andree Jeanne Rosenfeld (1934–2008)". Retrieved 28 November 2015.

External links

• Media related to Léon Rosenfeld at Wikimedia Commons
• Oral history interview transcript for Léon Rosenfeld on 3 September 1968, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library & Archives