The following obituary was published in Physics Today on September 1977.
Benjamin W. Lee, head of the theoretical physics department at the Fermi
National Accelerator Laboratory and professor of physics at the University
of Chicago, was tragically killed in an automobile accident near Keewanee,
Illinois on 16 June. He was travelling to the summer meeting of the Fermilab
Program Advisory Committee in Aspen, Colorado.The other members of
his family who were accompanying him were not seriously injured. Lee was
widely regarded as one of the world's leading physicists working on the
theory of elementary particles.
Born in Seoul, Korea in 1935, Lee came to the United
States as a student, receiving his B.S. degree from Miami University of
Ohio in 1956. His graduate work was at the University of Pittsburgh, where
he received the M.S. degree in 1958 and at the University of Pennsylvania,
where he worked under the direction of Abraham Klein, receiving his
Ph.D degree in 1960. He became a naturalized US citizen in 1968. After
several years at Pennsylvania and at the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton, N.J., in 1966 Lee accepted a professorship at the Institute
of Theoretical Physics at the State University of New York, Stony Brook,
which is directed by C. N. Yang. He served there till his move to Fermilab
in 1973.
Lee had one of the broadest ranges of interests
and researchof any physicist of his generation, but he returned again and
again to the study of symmetry principles and the weak interactions. He
was one of the first of the physicists working on SU(6) and related symmetries
in the mid-1960's to propose that these symmetries would find their natural
expression through the algebra of currents. He then played a leading role
in the development and applications of current algebra and phenomenological
Lagrangians, culminating in the publication in 1972 of the monograph on
Chiral
Dynamics. Lee turned in the early 1970's to the fundamental problem
of the renormalization of theories with spontaneously broken symmetry,
such as the \sigma model, and developed ideas and techniques that were
to serve him well in his later work on gauge theories.
Lee's involvement with gauge theories dated back
to 1964. He was concerned about the fact that superconductors appear to
provide a counterexample to the general theorum, which requires that spontaneous
symmetry breaking is always accompanied with massless spin-zero bosons.
With Klein, he wrote an article suggesting that the same might happen in
relativistic theories. It was soon realized that this is indeed the case,
provided the broken symmetry is a gauge symmetry, as it is in a superconductor.
Lee continued to work on the quantization of spontaneously
broken gauge theories. In 1971, after it had been shown by functional methods
that these theories are renormalizable, Lee developed a proof of this result
(for Abelian gauge theories) by operator methods. For theorists who were
unfamiliar with the functional formalism, it was Lee's proof that really
settled the matter. In the following year, Lee and Jean Zinn-Justin completed
the demonstration that renormalization does not spoil the cancellation
of unphysical singularities in these theories.
Lee also made a major contribution to the application
of this formalism to unified theories of weak and electromagetic interactions.
His talk at the "Rochester" conference at Fermilab in 1972 and his review
article with Ernest Abers have been instrumental in introducing physicists
to this subject.
Spurred by the discovery of neutral currents in
1973, Lee alongwith Mary K. Gaillard and Jonathan L. Rosner undertook a
systematic survey of the experimental signatures of charmed mesons and
baryons. Their report was circulated shortly before the discovery in November
of the Jpsi particle, and immediately became the bible that guided the
subsequent experimental work. Even before the discovery of the Jpsi, Lee
and Gaillard had used the gauge theory calculations of the KL -
KS mass difference and the K-L -> \gamma \gamma decay rate to
argue that the c-quark mass would have to be about 1.5 GeV or less, a prediction
that seems to have been strikingly confirmed by the observed mass of the
Jpsi. Lee and his Fermilab colleagues were among those who actively elaborated
and sharpened the theoretical understanding of the new hadrons.
Lee's decision to move permanently to Fermilab was
a declaration of his faith in the laboratory and of his recognition of
the unity of theory and experiment. His brilliance, dedication and deep
understanding- not only of physics, but of human nature- added immeasurably
to the style and standards of a young laboratory. He attracted other
outstanding people to the laboratory, and made of a world center of theory
and of experiment. He was a trusted and wise counselor to many experimentalists.
At the time of his death, Lee was in the midst of
enormous creativity. In the last six months of his life he had explored
the CP violation, of lepton number conservation, and of
high-energy limit of weak interactions in gauge theories, and had formulated
a theory based on the enlarged gauge group SU(3)*U(1). He was just beginning
a program of research on cosmology and was delighted with this opportunity
to move into yet another field.
Lee felt a strong sense of gratitude to older physicists
who had helped to advance his career, he in turn took every possible opportunity
to help the young physicists of the next generation to make their way into
research. To him, the advance of physics was a common enterprise, in which
the contributions of all deserved respect and encouragement. He will be
keenly missed by the large number of physicists who learned so much from
his work, and more poignantly, by those of us who had the privilege to
know him and work with him.
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