Peter Minkowski (born 10 May 1941) is a Swiss theoretical physicist.
He is primarily known for his proposal, with Harald Fritzsch, of SO(10) as the group of a grand unified theory and for his independent proposal, more-or-less simultaneously with a number of other theorists, of the seesaw mechanism for the generation of neutrino masses.
[1][2][3] Peter Minkowski, a life-long Swiss citizen, is the son of Mieczyslaw, a neurologist, and Irene Minkowski-Fux, a painter and architect.
After his Abitur at Realgymnasium Zurich and his physics Diploma in 1963 from the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ), he earned his Ph.D. in 1967 at ETHZ under Markus Fierz with thesis Versuch einer konsistenten Theorie eines Spin-2-Mesons ("Attempt at a Consistent Theory of a Spin 2 Meson").
Minkowski has pursued research along three main avenues: spontaneous phenomena in strong interactions and resonance structure, quark and gluon pairing;[4][5][6] unification of gauge symmetries, extensions to include gravity, extensions to cosmology;[2][7][8] and electroweak interactions and their interplay with the strong interactions.