Jeffrey Goldstone (born 3 September 1933) is aBritish theoreticalphysicist and anemeritus physics faculty member at theMITCenter for Theoretical Physics.

He worked at theUniversity of Cambridge until 1977. He is noted for the discovery of theNambu–Goldstone boson. He is currently working onquantum computation.

Born in Manchester, he was educated atManchester Grammar School andTrinity College, Cambridge, (B.A. 1954, Ph.D. 1958). He worked on the theory ofnuclear matter under the guidance ofHans Bethe and developed modifications ofFeynman diagrams for non-relativistic many-fermion systems, which are currently referred to as Goldstone diagrams.^[1] In 1957, he proved thelinked-cluster theorem, showing that only connected diagrams contribute to the calculation.^[2]

Goldstone was a research fellow ofTrinity College, Cambridge, from 1956 to 1960 and held visiting research posts atCopenhagen,CERN and Harvard. During this time, his research focus shifted toparticle physics and he investigated the nature ofrelativistic field theories with spontaneously broken symmetries. WithAbdus Salam andSteven Weinberg, he proved that in such theories zero-mass particles (Nambu–Goldstone bosons) must exist.

From 1962 to 1976, Goldstone was a faculty member at Cambridge. In the early 1970s, withPeter Goddard,Claudio Rebbi andCharles Thorn, he worked out the light-cone quantization theory of relativistic strings. He moved to theUSA in 1977 as Professor of Physics atMIT, where he has been the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics since 1983 and was Director of the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics from 1983-89.

Goldstone published research on solitons in quantum field theory withRoman Jackiw andFrank Wilczek, and on the quantum strong law of large numbers withEdward Farhi andSamuel Gutmann. Since 1997, he has been working, with Farhi, Gutmann, Michael Sipser and Andrew Childs, on quantum computation algorithms.^[3]

• Fellow of theRoyal Society (elected 1977),
• Fellow of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences (1977),
• Fellow of theAmerican Physical Society (1987).
• Honorary Fellow ofTrinity College, Cambridge (2000).
• Dannie Heineman Prize of the American Physical Society (1981) "For his contribution to nuclear physics, condensed matter physics and to quantum field theory, in establishing the first rigorous diagrammatic technique for the many-body problem and in proving a fundamental theorem on spontaneously broken global symmetry."^[4]
• Guthrie Medal of theInstitute of Physics (London) (1983)
• Dirac Medal of the International Center for Theoretical Physics (Trieste) (1991).

• Adiabatic quantum computation
• Effective action
• Goldstinos
• Sgoldstino
• Goldstone's theorem
• Quantum approximate optimization algorithm

• Jeffrey Goldstone at theMathematics Genealogy Project

• 1933 births
• Living people
• Scientists from Manchester
• People educated at Manchester Grammar School
• British theoretical physicists
• Fellows of the Royal Society
• Fellows of the American Physical Society
• People associated with CERN
• Quantum information scientists
• MIT Center for Theoretical Physics faculty

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