Davison "Dave" Eugene Soper (21 March 1943,

Milwaukee, Wisconsin Milwaukee ( ), officially the City of Milwaukee, is both the most populous and most densely populated city in the U.S. state of Wisconsin and the county seat of Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, Milwaukee County. With a population of 577,222 at th ...

) is an American theoretical physicist specializing in high energy physics.

Education and career

Soper received his bachelor's degree in 1965 from

Amherst College Amherst College ( ) is a private liberal arts college in Amherst, Massachusetts. Founded in 1821 as an attempt to relocate Williams College by its then-president Zephaniah Swift Moore, Amherst is the third oldest institution of higher educatio ...

and his PhD in 1971 under James Bjorken from

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

, where he worked with

John Kogut John Benjamin Kogut (6 March 1945 in Brooklyn) is an American theoretical physicist, specializing in high energy physics. Kogut received in 1971 his PhD from Stanford University under James Bjorken with thesis ''Quantum electrodynamics at infinit ...

. Soper was from 1971 to 1973 an instructor and from 1973 to 1977 an assistant professor at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...

. He was appointed in 1977–80 an assistant professor, in 1980–83 an associate professor, and from 1983 to the present a professor at the

University of Oregon The University of Oregon (UO, U of O or Oregon) is a public research university in Eugene, Oregon. Founded in 1876, the institution is well known for its strong ties to the sports apparel and marketing firm Nike, Inc, and its co-founder, billion ...

, where from 2004 to 2007 he was chair of the physics department. His doctoral dissertation on ''Null Plane Field Theory'' dealt with the theory of high energy scattering processes in the

parton model In particle physics, the parton model is a model of hadrons, such as protons and neutrons, proposed by Richard Feynman. It is useful for interpreting the cascades of radiation (a parton shower) produced from quantum chromodynamics (QCD) processes a ...

. With

George Sterman George Franklin Sterman (born June 2, 1946) is an American theoretical physicist and the Director of the C. N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics at Stony Brook University where he holds the rank Distinguished Professor. Background George St ...

and

John C. Collins John Clements Collins (born 1949) is a British-born American theoretical physicist and professor of physics at Pennsylvania State University. He attended the University of Cambridge where he obtained a B.A. in mathematics 1971 and a Ph.D. in the ...

, he proved a factorization theorem in perturbative

quantum chromodynamics In theoretical physics, quantum chromodynamics (QCD) is the theory of the strong interaction between quarks mediated by gluons. Quarks are fundamental particles that make up composite hadrons such as the proton, neutron and pion. QCD is a type ...

(QCD). Soper is a member of the "Coordinated Theoretical-Experimental Project on QCD“ (CTEQ), whose co-spokesperson he was from 2001 to 2004. He was on the editorial board of '' Physical Review Letters'' and '' Physical Review D''.

Honors

In 2009 Soper received with

R. Keith Ellis Richard Keith Ellis, (born 17 November 1949) is a British theoretical physicist, working at the University of Durham, and a leading authority on perturbative quantum chromodynamics and collider phenomenology. Education Ellis graduated from th ...

and

the Sakurai Prize of the

American Physical Society The American Physical Society (APS) is a not-for-profit membership organization of professionals in physics and related disciplines, comprising nearly fifty divisions, sections, and other units. Its mission is the advancement and diffusion of k ...

. He became a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2010. He was cited " For seminal work in Perturbative Quantum Chromodynamics, especially proving theorems on factorization which play a crucial role in interpreting high energy particle collisions."

Selected works

* ''Classical Field Theory''. Dover Publ., Mineola, NY 2008, (originally published by Wiley, New York 1976).

References

External links

D.E. Soper on InSPIRE databasearXiv.org preprints for D. Sopersearch on author Davison Soper
from

Google Scholar Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes p ...

Online notes from a two quarter course in quantum field theory taught by D. E. Soper
{{DEFAULTSORT:Soper, Davison 1943 births Living people Scientists from Milwaukee 21st-century American physicists Theoretical physicists Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellows of the American Physical Society J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics recipients Amherst College alumni Stanford University alumni University of Oregon faculty