José Leite Lopes
Encyclopedia
José Leite Lopes noted Brazil
Brazil
Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...

ian theoretical physicist
Theoretical physics
Theoretical physics is a branch of physics which employs mathematical models and abstractions of physics to rationalize, explain and predict natural phenomena...

 in the field of quantum field theory
Quantum field theory
Quantum field theory provides a theoretical framework for constructing quantum mechanical models of systems classically parametrized by an infinite number of dynamical degrees of freedom, that is, fields and many-body systems. It is the natural and quantitative language of particle physics and...

 and particle physics
Particle physics
Particle physics is a branch of physics that studies the existence and interactions of particles that are the constituents of what is usually referred to as matter or radiation. In current understanding, particles are excitations of quantum fields and interact following their dynamics...

.

Life

Leite Lopes began his university studies in 1935, enrolling in industrial chemistry at the Chemistry School of Pernambuco
Pernambuco
Pernambuco is a state of Brazil, located in the Northeast region of the country. To the north are the states of Paraíba and Ceará, to the west is Piauí, to the south are Alagoas and Bahia, and to the east is the Atlantic Ocean. There are about of beaches, some of the most beautiful in the...

. In 1937, while presenting a paper to a scientific conference in Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro , commonly referred to simply as Rio, is the capital city of the State of Rio de Janeiro, the second largest city of Brazil, and the third largest metropolitan area and agglomeration in South America, boasting approximately 6.3 million people within the city proper, making it the 6th...

, the young student met Brazilian physicist Mário Schenberg
Mário Schenberg
Mário Schenberg, , var. Mário Schönberg, Mario Schonberg, Mário Schoenberg), was a Jewish Brazilian electrical engineer, physicist, art critic and writer.-The Urca process:...

 and was introduced by him in São Paulo
São Paulo
São Paulo is the largest city in Brazil, the largest city in the southern hemisphere and South America, and the world's seventh largest city by population. The metropolis is anchor to the São Paulo metropolitan area, ranked as the second-most populous metropolitan area in the Americas and among...

 to Italian physicists Luigi Fantappiè
Luigi Fantappiè
Luigi Fantappiè was an Italian mathematician, known for work in mathematical analysis and for creating the theory of analytic functionals: he was a student and follower of Vito Volterra. Later in life he proposed scientific theories of sweeping scope.He was born in Viterbo, and studied at the...

 and Gleb Wataghin
Gleb Wataghin
Gleb Vassielievich Wataghin ; was a Ukrainian-Italian experimental physicist and a great scientific leader who gave a great impulse to the teaching and research on physics in two continents: in the University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil; and in the University of Turin, Turin, Italy.Wataghin was...

. All three were working on research in physics
Physics
Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...

 at the then recently created University of São Paulo
University of São Paulo
Universidade de São Paulo is a public university in the Brazilian state of São Paulo. It is the largest Brazilian university and one of the country's most prestigious...

, amid a climate of great intellectual excitement and a breeding ground for a bright young generation of what would become the élite of Brazilian physics, such as César Lattes
César Lattes
Cesare Mansueto Giulio Lattes , also known as Cesar Lattes, was a Brazilian experimental physicist, one of the discoverers of the pion, a composite subatomic particle made of a quark and an antiquark.-Life:Lattes was born to a family of Italian Jewish immigrants in Curitiba, Southern Brazil...

, Oscar Sala
Oscar Sala
Oscar Sala , Italian-Brazilian nuclear physicist and important scientific leader, Emeritus Professor of the Institute of Physics, University of São Paulo....

, Roberto Salmeron
Roberto Salmeron
Roberto Salmeron , Brazilian electrical engineer and experimental nuclear physicist of international renown, Emeritus Research Director of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique of France ....

, Jayme Tiomno
Jayme Tiomno
Jayme Tiomno , was a Brazilian experimental and theoretical physicist with interests in particle physics and general relativity. He was member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and a recipient of the Brazilian Order of Scientific Merit...

 and Marcelo Damy de Souza Santos
Marcelo Damy de Souza Santos
Marcelo Damy de Sousa Santos was a Brazilian physicist.Considered as one of the most important educators and researchers in physics in Brazil, along with Cesar Lattes, José Leite Lopes and Mario Schenberg, Damy was born in Campinas, São Paulo in 1914, the son of Harald Egydio de Souza Santos a...

. Encouraged to study physics by what he saw, Leite Lopes moved to Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro , commonly referred to simply as Rio, is the capital city of the State of Rio de Janeiro, the second largest city of Brazil, and the third largest metropolitan area and agglomeration in South America, boasting approximately 6.3 million people within the city proper, making it the 6th...

 after hist graduation in 1939. He took the entrance examinations to the National Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Brazil in 1940 and graduated a bachelor in physics in 1942. Accepting an invitation by Carlos Chagas Filho
Carlos Chagas Filho
Carlos Chagas Filho was a Brazilian physician, biologist and scientist active in the field of neuroscience. He was internationally renowned for his investigations on the neural mechanisms underlying the phenomenon of electrogenesis by the electroplaques of electric fishes...

, Leite Lopes started to work in the same year the Institute of Biophysics of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, but soon moved to the University of São Paulo to take up graduate studies in quantum mechanics
Quantum mechanics
Quantum mechanics, also known as quantum physics or quantum theory, is a branch of physics providing a mathematical description of much of the dual particle-like and wave-like behavior and interactions of energy and matter. It departs from classical mechanics primarily at the atomic and subatomic...

 with his teacher, friend and sponsor, Mário Schenberg. His main work during this time was on the calculation of Dirac
Paul Dirac
Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac, OM, FRS was an English theoretical physicist who made fundamental contributions to the early development of both quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics...

's radiation field of electron
Electron
The electron is a subatomic particle with a negative elementary electric charge. It has no known components or substructure; in other words, it is generally thought to be an elementary particle. An electron has a mass that is approximately 1/1836 that of the proton...

s.

In 1944, Leite Lopes got an American fellowship to study at Princeton University
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....

, in New Jersey
New Jersey
New Jersey is a state in the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic regions of the United States. , its population was 8,791,894. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York, on the southeast and south by the Atlantic Ocean, on the west by Pennsylvania and on the southwest by Delaware...

, USA, under Joseph Maria Jauch. There, he had the opportunity to learn and work with giants of theoretical physics, such as Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the theory of general relativity, effecting a revolution in physics. For this achievement, Einstein is often regarded as the father of modern physics and one of the most prolific intellects in human history...

, Wolfgang Pauli
Wolfgang Pauli
Wolfgang Ernst Pauli was an Austrian theoretical physicist and one of the pioneers of quantum physics. In 1945, after being nominated by Albert Einstein, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his "decisive contribution through his discovery of a new law of Nature, the exclusion principle or...

 and John von Neumann
John von Neumann
John von Neumann was a Hungarian-American mathematician and polymath who made major contributions to a vast number of fields, including set theory, functional analysis, quantum mechanics, ergodic theory, geometry, fluid dynamics, economics and game theory, computer science, numerical analysis,...

, despite the fact that most of the faculty was absent, involved in the Manhattan Project
Manhattan Project
The Manhattan Project was a research and development program, led by the United States with participation from the United Kingdom and Canada, that produced the first atomic bomb during World War II. From 1942 to 1946, the project was under the direction of Major General Leslie Groves of the US Army...

 (the development of the first atomic bombs). In 1946, he finished his doctoral dissertation, on the topic of the influence of the recoil of heavy particles on the nuclear potential energy, and returned to Rio de Janeiro. He accepted the interim chair of Theoretical and Superior Physics at the University of Brazil, and started to lecture on quantum mechanics and quantum theory of radiation. In 1948 he was confirmed as chairman after presenting a thesis on the theory of nuclear force
Nuclear force
The nuclear force is the force between two or more nucleons. It is responsible for binding of protons and neutrons into atomic nuclei. The energy released causes the masses of nuclei to be less than the total mass of the protons and neutrons which form them...

s.

Together with César Lattes
César Lattes
Cesare Mansueto Giulio Lattes , also known as Cesar Lattes, was a Brazilian experimental physicist, one of the discoverers of the pion, a composite subatomic particle made of a quark and an antiquark.-Life:Lattes was born to a family of Italian Jewish immigrants in Curitiba, Southern Brazil...

, a young physicist from São Paulo who had achieved international fame due to his co-discovery of a new kind of nuclear particle, the pion
Pion
In particle physics, a pion is any of three subatomic particles: , , and . Pions are the lightest mesons and they play an important role in explaining the low-energy properties of the strong nuclear force....

 (pi-meson
Meson
In particle physics, mesons are subatomic particles composed of one quark and one antiquark, bound together by the strong interaction. Because mesons are composed of sub-particles, they have a physical size, with a radius roughly one femtometer: 10−15 m, which is about the size of a proton...

), Leite Lopes was instrumental in creating in January 1949, in Rio de Janeiro, the Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas
Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas
The Brazilian Center for Physics Research is a physics research center sponsored by the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development , linked to the Ministry of Science and Technology. CBPF was founded in 1949 from a joint effort of Cesar Lattes, José Leite Lopes, and...

 (Brazilian Center for Research in Physics) (CBPF), a research center in theoretical physics (the first in Latin America
Latin America
Latin America is a region of the Americas where Romance languages  – particularly Spanish and Portuguese, and variably French – are primarily spoken. Latin America has an area of approximately 21,069,500 km² , almost 3.9% of the Earth's surface or 14.1% of its land surface area...

), maintained by funds from Confederação Nacional de Indústrias (Brazilian Confederation of Industries), then presided by Euvaldo Lodi. In the same year Leite Lopes was invited by Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Oppenheimer
Julius Robert Oppenheimer was an American theoretical physicist and professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Along with Enrico Fermi, he is often called the "father of the atomic bomb" for his role in the Manhattan Project, the World War II project that developed the first...

 to spend another year of study at the Institute for Advanced Study
Institute for Advanced Study
The Institute for Advanced Study, located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States, is an independent postgraduate center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. It was founded in 1930 by Abraham Flexner...

 in Princeton, where he attended lectures by Richard Feynman
Richard Feynman
Richard Phillips Feynman was an American physicist known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as in particle physics...

, Victor Weisskopf and Paul Dirac
Paul Dirac
Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac, OM, FRS was an English theoretical physicist who made fundamental contributions to the early development of both quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics...

. In 1957 he again visited the USA on a fellowship, by invitation of Richard Feynman
Richard Feynman
Richard Phillips Feynman was an American physicist known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as in particle physics...

, at the California Institute of Technology
California Institute of Technology
The California Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Pasadena, California, United States. Caltech has six academic divisions with strong emphases on science and engineering...

.

In 1969, the new military regime in Brazil took away his political rights, together with several other professors, supposedly on the basis of his participation in a "communist conspiracy". He was dismissed summarily from the very Center he had created and exiled himself voluntarily in the USA (at the Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States....

) but after evidence of USA collaboration with the 1964 military coup was manifest he went to Université Louis Pasteur, in Strasbourg
Strasbourg
Strasbourg is the capital and principal city of the Alsace region in eastern France and is the official seat of the European Parliament. Located close to the border with Germany, it is the capital of the Bas-Rhin département. The city and the region of Alsace are historically German-speaking,...

, France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

. From 1974 to 1978, Leite Lopes was appointed full professor with the Université Louis Pasteur, taking up the directorship of the Division of High Energy and the position of vice-director of the Centre de Recherches Nucleaires, a part of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Centre national de la recherche scientifique
The National Center of Scientific Research is the largest governmental research organization in France and the largest fundamental science agency in Europe....

 (CNRS). He returned to Brazil in 1986, as the director of the Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas. He was also an honorary president of the Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science
Sociedade Brasileira para o Progresso da Ciência
Sociedade Brasileira para o Progresso da Ciência is a Brazilian scientific society created in 1948 by several prominent scientists, with the aim of promoting science, culture and education in the country by means of publications, conferences and political actions on behalf of science's advancement...

.

Among many international and national honors and prizes, Leite Lopes received the 1999 UNESCO Science Prize
UNESCO Science Prize
The UNESCO Science Prize is a biennial scientific prize awarded by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization to "a person or group of persons for an outstanding contribution they have made to the technological development of a developing member state or region through...

 and received the Great Cross of the Brazilian Order of Scientific Merit
Brazilian Order of Scientific Merit
The National Order of Scientific Merit is an honor bestowed upon Brazilian and foreign personalities recognized for their scientific and technical contributions to the cause and development of science in Brazil.-Biology:* Marcelo Hermes-Lima* Jorge Curi...

.

Works

Leite Lopes is internationally recognized for his many contributions to theoretical physics, particularly in the following areas:
  • Prediction of the existence of neutral vectorial boson
    Boson
    In particle physics, bosons are subatomic particles that obey Bose–Einstein statistics. Several bosons can occupy the same quantum state. The word boson derives from the name of Satyendra Nath Bose....

    s (Z0 boson), 1n 1958, by devising an equation which showed the analogy of the weak nuclear interactions with electromagnetism. Steve Weinberg, Sheldon Glashow and Abdus Salam
    Abdus Salam
    Mohammad Abdus Salam, NI, SPk Mohammad Abdus Salam, NI, SPk Mohammad Abdus Salam, NI, SPk (Urdu: محمد عبد السلام, pronounced , (January 29, 1926– November 21, 1996) was a Pakistani theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in Physics for his work on the electroweak unification of the...

     used later these results to develop the electroweak unification. They were awarded with the Nobel Prize
    Nobel Prize
    The Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...

     of Physicis in 1979.
  • The vector dominance model in nuclear electroweak interaction
    Electroweak interaction
    In particle physics, the electroweak interaction is the unified description of two of the four known fundamental interactions of nature: electromagnetism and the weak interaction. Although these two forces appear very different at everyday low energies, the theory models them as two different...

    s
  • Nuclear shell structure in photonuclear reactions
  • Construction of the Fock relativistic space
  • Meson pseudoscalar potential in deuteron theory
  • Scalar meson pairs
  • Models of lepton
    Lepton
    A lepton is an elementary particle and a fundamental constituent of matter. The best known of all leptons is the electron which governs nearly all of chemistry as it is found in atoms and is directly tied to all chemical properties. Two main classes of leptons exist: charged leptons , and neutral...

     and quark
    Quark
    A quark is an elementary particle and a fundamental constituent of matter. Quarks combine to form composite particles called hadrons, the most stable of which are protons and neutrons, the components of atomic nuclei. Due to a phenomenon known as color confinement, quarks are never directly...

     structures

External links

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