Reinhard Oehme (German: [ˈøːmə]; born 26 January 1928, Wiesbaden; died sometime between 29 September and 4 October 2010, Hyde Park[1]) was a German-American physicist known for the discovery of C (charge conjugation) non-conservation in the presence of P (parity) violation, the formulation and proof of hadron dispersion relations, the "Edge of the Wedge Theorem" in the function theory of several complex variables, the Goldberger-Miyazawa-Oehme sum rule, reduction of quantum field theories, Oehme-Zimmermann superconvergence relations for gauge field correlation functions, and many other contributions.
Completing the Abitur at the Rheingau Gymnasium in Geisenheim near Wiesbaden, Oehme started to study physics and mathematics at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main,[2] receiving the Diploma in 1948 as student of Erwin Madelung.
The translation of the title of his thesis is: "Creation of Photons in Collisions of Nucleons”[6] Later this year, Heisenberg asked him to join Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker on a trip to Brazil for the start-up of the Instituto de Física Teórica in São Paulo,[7] considered also as a possible escape in view of the tense situation in Europe.
Oehme was there among an exceptional group of people around Heisenberg, including Vladimir Glaser, Rolf Hagedorn, Fritz Houtermans, Gerhard Lüders, Walter Thirring, Kurt Symanzik, Carl Friedrich von Weizsaecker, Wolfhart Zimmermann, Bruno Zumino, who all have made important contributions to physics at some time.
A year later, with Heisenberg's recommendation to his friend Enrico Fermi, Oehme was offered a research associate position at the University of Chicago, where he worked at the Institute for Nuclear Studies.
These results led to the paper by him with Marvin L. Goldberger and Hironari Miyazawa on the dispersion relations for pion-nucleon scattering, which also contains the Goldberger-Miyazawa-Oehme Sum Rule.
[18] The analytic connection Oehme found between particle and antiparticle amplitudes is the first example of a fundamental feature of local quantum field theory: the crossing property.
Yang in which it is shown that weak interactions must violate charge conjugation conservation in the event of a positive outcome of the polarization experiment in beta-decay.
The results of Oehme form the basis for the later experimental effort to study CP Symmetry, and the fundamental discovery of non-conservation at a lower level of interaction strength.
[29] Prompted by the letter, T D Lee, R Oehme and C N Yang provided a detailed discussion of the interplay of non-invariance under P, C and T, and of applications to the Kaon - anti-Kaon complex.
[39] Further contributions by Oehme, like those involving complex angular momentum, [40] Rising Cross sections,[41] Broken Symmetries, Current algebras and Weak Interactions,[42] as well as chapters in books, may be found in: (http://home.uchicago.edu/~roehme/).