Yuri Golfand

Who is Yuri Golfand?

Yuri Abramovich Golfand was a Russian and Israeli physicist known, in particular, for his 1971 paper where they proposed supersymmetry between bosonic and ferminoic particles by extending the Poincaré algebra with anticommuting spinor generators. The algebra they constructed is also called a Super-Poincaré algebra.

Yuri Golfand was also a Refusenik. He was fired from his work at the Physical institute in Moscow in 1973, two years after publishing his work on supersymmetry. After 18 years of waiting, he obtained a permission to leave Soviet Union and emigrated to Israel in 1990. He worked at the Technion and died in 1994.