Reinhard Oehme

Reinhard Oehme (born 26 January 1928, Wiesbaden; died sometime between 29 September and 4 October 2010, Hyde Park ) was a German-American physicist known for the discovery of C (charge conjugation) non-conservation in the presence of P (parity) violation, the formulation and proof of hadron dispersion relations, the "Edge of the Wedge Theorem" in the function theory of several complex variables, the Goldberger-Miyazawa-Oehme sum rule, reduction of quantum field theories, Oehme-Zimmermann superconvergence relations for gauge field correlation functions, and many other contributions.

Oehme was born in Wiesbaden, Germany as the son of Dr. Reinhold Oehme and Katharina Kraus.

Completing the Abitur at the Rheingau Gymnasium in Geisenheim near Wiesbaden, Oehme started to study physics and mathematics at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, receiving the Diploma in 1948 as student of Erwin Madelung.

Then he moved to Göttingen, joining the Max Planck Institute for Physics as a doctoral student of Werner Heisenberg, who was also a professor at the University of Göttingen.

Early in 1951, Oehme completed the requirements for his Dr.rer.nat at Göttingen Universität.

In 1952, in São Paulo, Brazil, he married Mafalda Pisani, who was born in Berlin as the daughter of Giacopo Pisani and Wanda d'Alfonso.

The translation of the title of his thesis is: "Creation of Photons in Collisions of Nucleons” Later this year, Heisenberg asked him to join Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker on a trip to Brazil for the start-up of the Instituto de Física Teórica in São Paulo, considered also as a possible escape in view of the tense situation in Europe. In 1953, he returned to his assistant position at the Max Planck Institute in Göttingen. During the early fifties, the institute was a most interesting place. Oehme was there among an exceptional group of people around Heisenberg, including Vladimir Glaser, Rolf Hagedorn, Fritz Houtermans, Gerhard Lüders, Walter Thirring, Kurt Symanzik, Carl Friedrich von Weizsaecker, Wolfhart Zimmermann, Bruno Zumino, who all have made important contributions to physics at some time. A year later, with Heisenberg's recommendation to his friend Enrico Fermi, Oehme was offered a research associate position at the University of Chicago, where he worked at the Institute for Nuclear Studies.

Publications associated with this

period are described below under Work.

In 1954 in Chicago, Oehme studied the analytic properties of forward

Scattering amplitudes in quantum field theories.

He found that particle-particle and

antiparticle-particle amplitudes are connected by analytic continuation in the

complex energy plane.

These results led to the paper by him with Marvin L. Goldberger

and Hironari Miyazawa on the dispersion relations for pion-nucleon scattering, which

also contains the Goldberger-Miyazawa-Oehme Sum Rule.

There is good agreement with the experimental results of the Fermi Group

at Chicago, the Lindenbaum Group at Brookhaven and others.

The GMO Sum Rule is often used in the analysis of the pion-nucleon system.

Oehme published a proper derivation of hadronic forward dispersion relations on the basis of local quantum field theory in an article published in Il Nuovo Cimento.

His proof remains

valid in gauge theories with confinement.

The analytic connection Oehme found between particle and antiparticle amplitudes is the first example of a fundamental feature of local quantum field theory: the crossing property.

It is proven here, in a non-perturbative setting, on the basis of the analytic properties of amplitudes which are a consequence of locality and spectrum, like the dispersion relations.

For generalizations, one still relies mostly on perturbation theory.

For the purpose of using the powerful methods of the theory of functions

of several complex variables for the proof of non-forward dispersion relations,

and for analytic properties of other Greens functions, Oehme formulated and proved a fundamental theorem which he called the “Edge of the Wedge Theorem” (“Keilkanten Theorem”).

In the fall of 1956, he moved to Princeton as a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, returning in 1958 to the University of Chicago as a professor in the department of physics and at the Enrico Fermi Institute for Nuclear Studies.

This work was done mainly in the Fall of 1956 at the Institute for Advanced Study in collaboration with Hans-Joachim Bremermann and John G. Taylor.

University of Maryland, College Park, 1957; Universität Wien, Austria 1961; Imperial College, London1963-64;

Guggenheim Fellow, 1963–64; Humboldt Price, 1974; Fellowship of the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) 1976, 1988.

The University of Chicago offers annually the Enrico Fermi, Robert R. McCormick & Mafalda and Reinhard Oehme Postdoctoral Research Fellowships

(*For citations see corresponding publications and acknowledgements in publications. )

Universität Karlsruhe, Germany, 1974, 1975, 1977; University of Tokyo, Japan, 1976, 1988;

Research Institute of Fundamental Physics, University of Kyoto, Japan, 1976.

Instituto de Física Teórica, São Paulo, Brasil; Brookhaven National Laboratory; Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; CERN, Geneva, Switzerland; International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Miramare-Trieste, Italy; Max Planck Institute for Physics, München, Germany.

In 1998, he became professor emeritus.

Mafalda died in Chicago in August of the year 2004.