In Memoriam, Satish Joglekar (by Rohini Godbole)
The Indian High Energy Physics Community regrets to announce passing away of Satish D. Joglekar, a Stony Brook alumnus, well known for his contribution to the understanding of the issue of renormalisation of Quantum Field Theories with spontaneously broken gauge symmetries. He had been a Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur in India for about three decades, where he was respected and revered as a deep thinker and as a 'par excellence' teacher. The Indian High Energy Physics community deeply regrets the loss sustained by his untimely death. After completing his Ph.D. SUNY-SB, he worked as a post-doctoral research associate at Fermilab, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton and University of California at Berkeley. He joined I.I.T.Kanpur as a faculty member in 1981 and had been there ever since.While at Stony Brook he was a Ph.D. student with Prof. Benjamin Lee and had moved to FNAL along with him. His single author paper on 'S-matrix derivation of the Weinberg Model' written in 1973, where he showed, independently, that the Standard Model Interaction Lagrangian and the pattern of its particle content can be inferred by making demands on the requirement of 'good' high energy behaviour of various Born amplitudes, is of great relevance even today. Particle physicists have started looking all over again at the issue of the connection (if any) between renormalisabiltiy and unitarity, in the context of going beyond the 'Weinberg Model' mentioned in the title of the paper. In the meantime this model has become a key part of the 'Standard Model of Particle Physics ' and its final verification is being pursued at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
In a seminal paper on 'General Theory of Renormalization of Gauge Invariant Operators' (with Benjamin Lee, cited 176 times), they managed to show that it is possible to choose a basis in which the gauge non-invariant operators decouple from the Gauge Invariant ones to all orders. This result played a crucial role in the studies of renormalisation of theories with spontaneously broken gauge symmetries. In his single author papers, he discussed renormalisability and gauge invariance of products of operators and hence that of the Operator Product Expansion. His other well known paper 'Trace and Dilatation Anomalies in Gauge Theories' (with Anthony Duncan and John Collins, (cited 432 times), had important bearing for formal developments in gauge theories. The long lasting impact his early publications is realised by noting that many of them continue to get cited today.
It appears that a personal trauma, which may been caused by Ben Lee's accidental death in 1977, stopped his steady record of high quality publications for quite some time. A little time after his return to India he joined as a Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur, where he worked for about three decades, till his death. His pedagogical skills as well as his deep knowledge and understanding of Quantum Field theory won him many a admirers and followers. He continued to work on the more esoteric aspects of gauge theories. For many, the problems he tackled might have lacked topicality. But as a child of the golden era of the gauge theory revolution in Particle Physics of the 1970s, to which he had contributed significantly, his heart was always in the formal structure of gauge theories which he continued to explore, with his students or otherwise. When opportunity arose, he tried to understand different modern developments as well. To quote a young Indian string theorist (Sandip Trivedi), who took his first steps in the SM and QFT with Prof. Joglekar:
"....met him again a few years ago when I was in IIT K for a thesis defence and we spent quite sometime discussing Randall-Sundrum models! I was pleasantly surprised to find him so interested. As always he was very precise in his questions and as always they revealed a deep understanding of quantum field theory. "
As far as I was concerned personally, I was always told to look up to him as I studied for my B.Sc., M.Sc. and Doctorate at the same Institutions where he had done so, about three to four years before me and had performed with such great distinction. He had achieved various milestones which all my teachers, including those at SUNY-SB, encouraged me to strive for (alas!). In my interactions with him in those years I found him to be a patient and kind human being. My area of work did not overlap with him overly much, but whenever we met, the keenness of his intellect and the clear, logical thinking came out in a striking manner in whatever discussions we had.
An obituary can be found at http://www.iitk.ac.in/phy/obituary_sdj/. Below I reproduce a few lines that were written spontaneously after receiving the news of his sudden demise, which say it all.
Rohini Godbole
CERN (till january 2010)
and
Centre for High Energy Physics
Indian Institute of Science
Bangalore, India (permanent address)
SUNY-SB/ITP alumnus