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MIT’s Newest Nobel Laureate
Wilczek’s restless fall nights are over
By Sally Atwood

For the past several years, theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek has spent a restless night each October wondering whether he’d receive a call from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences the next morning. After all, when he was a graduate student at Princeton University, he and his advisor, David Gross, developed a theory that explains the fundamental force of nature that holds together quarks, the building blocks of the protons and neutrons in the nucleus of an atom. In the 20 years since the discovery, their theory has come to be regarded as a cornerstone of modern physics. At 5:00 a.m. on October 5, Wilczek gave up and headed for the shower. At 5:12, the call came in. Later that day at a press conference, Wilczek described how he dripped all over the floor as he spoke with members of the academy, and he grinned when he allowed that his sleepless nights were finally over. He, Gross, and H. David Politzer—who did similar work on his own at Harvard University—had won the 2004 Nobel Prize in physics.

Wilczek has been on the MIT faculty since 2000. (Gross is now at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Politzer is at Caltech.) The three physicists arrived at an important insight about the force that binds quarks together. The closer quarks come to each other, the weaker the force becomes, until the quarks essentially behave as free particles. This phenomenon is called asymptotic freedom. Conversely, the farther quarks move from each other, the stronger the force that binds them together. This understanding is the basis of the theory of quantum chromodynamics, which is now part of the Standard Model, a theory about three of the four posited fundamental forces in nature.

Wilczek has been busy fielding calls from reporters and well-wishers since the announcement. He’s also watched more than 1,000 congratulatory e-mails flood his in-box. He says he’ll eventually respond to each one individually, but in the meantime, he has sent a mass reply of thanks along with a sonnet he wrote for the occasion.

These days, Wilczek is busy pursuing a new particle he’s named the “axion.” He says the elusive particle, which is predicted to have unusual properties, has become one of the leading contenders to explain the dark matter in the universe, whose existence cosmologists have surmised. “Axions themselves are very hard to detect. I don’t expect to see them in my lifetime. Maybe if I take good care of myself,” Wilczek says with a smile.