Lochlainn O'Raifeartaigh

Who was Lochlainn O'Raifeartaigh?

Lochlainn O'Raifeartaigh was an Irish physicist of worldwide repute in the field of theoretical particle physics. He is best known for the O'Raifeartaigh Theorem, an important result in unification theory, and the O'Raifeartaigh Model of supersymmetry breaking.

O'Raifeartaigh was born in Clontarf, Dublin in 1933, and most of his scientific career was centred around that city, where he obtained his first degrees at University College Dublin, and spent from 1968 until his death as Senior Professor at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. He obtained his doctorate from the University of Zurich in 1960, under Walter Heitler. He also visited many institutions, notably Madras, IHES Bures, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, but it was during an extended stay at Syracuse University that he made the discovery that established his reputation. This result, which became known as O'Raifeartaigh's no-go theorem, showed that it was impossible to combine internal and relativistic symmetries other than in a trivial fashion, thus ending a widespread quest by the particle physics community to achieve this fusion. The O'Raifeartaigh theorem was later generalized to a more famous result known as the Coleman–Mandula theorem.