Martin Lüscher

Who is Martin Lüscher?

Martin Lüscher is a Swiss theoretical physicist, who works primarily on numerical quantum chromodynamics.

Lüscher studied at the University of Bern and the University of Hamburg, where he earned his doctorate. He worked since the 1979s at DESY in Hamburg, was a professor for theoretical physics in Bern from 1980-83 and later in Hamburg. Since 1999 he is at CERN.

Lüscher is one of the people who are the driving powers in the development of "quantum chromodynamics on the lattice". Among other results, in 1991 he found with Weisz and Wolff a new recursive procedure, which avoids large lattices and allows studies for many length scales. In the 1980s he developed with Weisz "improved actions" for lattice field theories which achieve better convergence properties in the continuum limit.

In 2000 he received the Max Planck medal of the Deutschen Physikalischen Gesellschaft and in 2004 the Greinacher Prize of the University of Bern.