| Léon Rosenfeld | |
| Birth Date: | 14 August 1904 |
| Birth Place: | Charleroi, Belgium |
| Citizenship: | Belgium |
| Alma Mater: | University of Liège (PhD, 1926) |
| Known For: | Belinfante–Rosenfeld stress–energy tensor, coined the term lepton |
| Awards: | Francqui Prize (1949) |
| Spouse: | Yvonne Cambresier |
| Children: | Andrée, Jean |
| Signature: | Solvay1933Signature Rosenfeld.jpg |
Léon Rosenfeld (in French ʁɔzɛnfɛld/; 14 August 1904 in Charleroi - 23 March 1974[1]) was a Belgian physicist and a communist activist.
Rosenfeld was born into a secular Jewish family. He was a polyglot who knew eight or nine languages and was fluent in at least five of them.
Rosenfeld obtained a PhD at the University of Liège in 1926, and he was a close collaborator of the physicist Niels Bohr from 1930 until Bohr's death in 1962.[2] Rosenfeld published in 1930 the first systematic Hamiltonian approach to Lagrangian models that possess a local gauge symmetry, which predates by two decades the work by Paul Dirac and Peter Bergmann.[3] Rosenfeld contributed to a wide range of physics fields, from statistical physics and quantum field theory to astrophysics.[4] Along with Frederik Belinfante, he derived the Belinfante–Rosenfeld stress–energy tensor. He also founded the journal Nuclear Physics and coined the term lepton.[5]
In 1933, Rosenfeld married Yvonne Cambresier, who was one of the first women to obtain a Physics PhD from a European university. They had a daughter, Andrée Rosenfeld (1934–2008) and a son, Jean Rosenfeld.[6]
Rosenfeld held chairs at multiple universities: Liège, Utrecht, Manchester, and Copenhagen.
In 1949 Léon Rosenfeld was awarded the Francqui Prize for Exact Sciences.