Yuri Golfand

Yuri Abramovich Golfand (Russian: Ю́рий Абра́мович Го́льфанд; January 10, 1922, in Kharkiv – February 17, 1994, in Jerusalem) was a Russian and Israeli physicist known, in particular, for his 1971 paper (joint with his student Evgeny Likhtman) 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.

References

• M. Shifman. Introduction to the Yuri Golfand Memorial Volume «Many Faces of Superworld»

• Гольфанд Ю. А., Лихтман Е. П., Расширение алгебры генераторов группы Пуанкаре и нарушение Р-инвариант-ности, "Письма в ЖЭТФ", 1971, т. 13, в. 8, с. 452 (Russian). (Yu. A. Golfand and E. P. Likhtman, JETP Lett. 13, 323 (1971). Reprinted in Supersymmetry, Ed. S. Ferrara, (North-Holland/World Scientific, Amsterdam — Singapore, 1987), Vol. 1, page 7. )

• Yu. A. Golfand and E. P. Likhtman, «On the Extensions of the Algebra of the Generators of the Poincaré Group by the Bispinor Generators», in I. E. Tamm Memorial Volume Problems of Theoretical Physics, Eds. V. L. Ginzburg et al., (Nauka, Moscow 1972), page 37.