This Year's Nobel Prize in Physics

David Gross, David Politzer and Frank Wilczek win the Nobel Prize in Physics for "the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction".

Asymptotic Freedom can be found here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymptotic_freedom

Strong Interaction can be found here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_interaction

Essentially these are part of the attempt to discover a grand unified field theory.

Asymptotic freedom implies that in high-energy scattering the quarks move within nucleons, such as the neutron and proton, essentially as free, non-interacting particles, and it allows physicists to calculate the cross sections of various events in particle physics reliably using parton techniques.

 

The discovery also helped rehabilitate the reputation of quantum field theory (QFT) as a coherent description of particle interactions. Prior to 1973, many theorists suspected that QFT was rendered fundamentally incoherent by the short-distance Landau pole that arose in quantum electrodynamics and some other field theories. Asymptotically free theories, however, lack this Landau pole. The discovery of asymptotic freedom was therefore a key development toward the emergence of a Standard Model of particle physics based on quantum field theory.