Roger Dashen


Roger Frederick Dashen was an American theoretical physicist who studied particle physics and quantum field theory.
Dashen studied physics at the Harvard University, where he graduated "summa cum laude" in 1960. Then he went to Caltech, where he earned his PhD in 1964. After that, he was a professor at Caltech in 1967 and the Institute for Advanced Study in 1969. In 1986, he became a professor at the University of California, San Diego in 1988 was Head of Faculty. He played a leading role in the establishment of a supercomputer center at UCSD and in the establishment of the Institute for Theoretical Physics of the National Science Foundation at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
In the 1960s he worked partly in collaboration with Murray Gell-Mann with current algebras of particle physics and models with chiral symmetry. In 1964, he worked on S-matrix methods to calculate electromagnetic corrections to strong interactions, including the mass difference between protons and neutrons with Steven Frautschi. In the 1970s, he studied with Brosl Hasslacher and André Neveu quantum field theoretical model theories for extended particles and semiclassical approximations for their analysis. They developed the Dashen-Hasslacher-Neveu method for quantization of solitons using path integrals. After the discovery of instantons in the quantum by Polyakov, he examined it with David Gross and Curtis Callan. In the 1980s, he worked with lattice gauge theory s and found with Neuberger is an upper bound for the Higgs Boson - mass.
Dashen was also involved in sound propagation in the ocean, where he applied quantum field theoretical methods on the problem of random scattering of sound in the ocean. He worked with his JASON colleagues Kenneth M. Watson and Frederik Zachariasen. Dashen was senior scientific adviser to the US Navy, including the committee on the safety of SSBNs, the rocket-carrying submarines, and matters relating to submarine warfare. He was a member of the JASON Defense Advisory Group.
Dashen was a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1984.
He was married and had two daughters.

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