Harry Lehmann

Harry Lehmann was born in 1924 at Güstrow, Mecklenburg. After graduation from school in Rostock, the German army drafted him in 1942 for service in North Africa, where he was taken prisoner of war by the American forces. He spent three years in a prison camp in the United States; there he had the opportunity to study on his own, and to prepare for the university. When he was released in 1946, he soon returned to his parents in Rostock and began to study physics, first at the University of Rostock, then at the Humboldt University in East Berlin, obtaining his diploma with a thesis on experimental physics. In 1949 he became assistant of Friedrich Hund at the University of Jena, where he wrote his doctoral dissertation on classical electrodynamics. When Hund moved to the University of Frankfurt, Lehmann served at Jena as acting professor, until Hund was replaced.

In the fall of 1952, Heisenberg offered Lehmann a position at the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Göttingen. There he joined an active group of young theorists from Germany and abroad who had come to collaborate with Heisenberg. After his initial stay, he requested permission to extend his visit; but the authorities of the former German Democratic Republic never responded, and so Harry Lehmann remained in the west. As a result it was not until 1976 that he could once again visit his parents in Rostock.

A main topic of discussion in Heisenberg's institute was the method of renormalization, that had been developed in the United States and Japan right after the war. This technique made it possible to compute measurable quantities of quantum electrodynamics, and to compare them with experiments, even though divergent integrals entered intermediate stages of the calculations. Despite the enormous success of renormalization theory, made evident by the high-precision agreement between theory and experiment, many physicists of the older generation in Europe remained skeptical and were convinced that the infinities indicated a serious deficiency of quantum field theory. Dirac, for instance, called renormalization theory “a sin against theoretical physics”.

On the other hand the younger theoretical physicists were quite enthusiastic. They considered it a challenge to reformulate the theory in such a way that renormalization infinities never occur, either in the formulation of the principles, or in the calculation of observable quantities. Harry Lehmann's publication on the properties of propagators [1] was an early decisive step in this direction. From minimal assumptions he derived the main properties of propagators, and expressed the constants of renormalization by integrals over finite quantities, even though those quantities diverged in perturbation theory.

He carried out a large part of his pioneering work in the 1950's, in collaboration with Kurt Symanzik and Wolfhart Zimmermann. The shorthand designation LSZ is familiar to all elementary particle physicists up to this day. The LSZ-formalism and the Lehmann representation are among the most important basic tools of the theory of elementary particles [2]. An important application of this technique in scattering theory provides the relation between scattering amplitudes and time ordered correlation functions. These were derived as an immediate consequence of the asymptotic behavior of field operators in the distant past and future.

In 1955 Harry Lehmann left Heisenberg's institute to visit Copenhagen as a member of the CERN Study Group, and in 1956 he accepted a professorship at the University of Hamburg to become the successor to Wilhelm Lenz. He founded the theoretical elementary particle physics group, and for thirty years, his strong personality determined the character of the II. Institut für Theoretische Physik at Hamburg University. He became Professor Emeritus in 1986. He also advised the German Electron Synchrotron laboratory DESY and helped start its theory group by persuading Kurt Symanzik to return there from New York. Many young scientists were strongly influenced by his personality, by his style of discussion in seminars, by the conciseness of his insightful contributions to research, and by his views on physics in general.

Harry Lehmann's interest in the theory of dispersion relations led to the beginning of his close collaboration with Res Jost. In the case of equal mass scattering Jost and Lehmann found a representation for matrix elements of the commutator of two field operators between energy-momentum eigenstates [3]. This representation was extended by Dyson to the general case of unequal masses [4]. On the basis of the Dyson representation, Lehmann derived dispersion relations and other analytic properties of the scattering amplitudes as a consequence of locality, relativistic invariance and conditions on the particle spectrum [5]. These results are also valid for composite particles despite their internal structure, since only general properties are used in the derivation which are independent of the dynamics of the system. Dispersion relations, therefore, provide an experimental test for the principles of local quantum field theory.

Harry Lehmann remained active in research until the end of his life. He directed several NATO Advanced Study Institutes in Cargèse (France). With K. Pohlmeyer he worked on field theories with non-polynomial Lagrangians. During his last years he investigated symmetry breaking effects for the quark mass spectrum together with T. T. Wu.

Harry Lehmann's scientific merits were recognized in many ways. He received the Max Planck medal of the German Physical Society 1967 and he was made a Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur on December 31, 1969. He was honoured in 1997 by the Dannie Heineman Prize of the American Physical Society and the American Institute of Physics.

Harry Lehmann was an excellent speaker with the remarkable ability to communicate involved and difficult subjects understandably. We remember him gratefully, in friendship, and with esteem for his scientific work.