Prof. Dr. em. Peter Minkowski (Zurich 1941 - Bern 2025)
Peter Minkowski was born in 1941 in Zurich, where he also grew up. His family originated from Poland. He studied at ETH Zurich and completed his doctorate under Markus Fierz in 1967. Subsequently, he worked as a postdoc, first at the University of Louvain in Belgium, then at the PSI (formerly the Swiss Institute for Nuclear Research), and as a Fellow at CERN.
However, many of his most renowned works date from his time at Caltech from 1973–1976. These years were a pivotal and revolutionary era for particle physics as a whole, and Caltech played an essential role in this (thanks in part to Feynman and Gell-Mann). In 1973, Harald Fritzsch, Murray Gell-Mann, and Heiri Leutwyler (all at Caltech at the time) authored a paper in which they argued that the strong interaction could be an SU(3) gauge theory of quarks and gluons. In that same year, Gross, Wilczek, and Politzer independently demonstrated that these types of theories are asymptotically free.
It thus became evident that Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) was the correct theory of the strong interaction and that the same type of theory describes both the electroweak and the strong interaction. Following this success, it was natural to consider whether there could be a unified theory for all three interactions. To this day, the most promising Grand Unified Theory is the SO(10) gauge theory, which Peter proposed together with Harald Fritzsch [1].
In this theory, at very high energies, there is only one type of matter, which transforms under SO(10). In contrast to earlier attempts based on SU(5), Peter’s theory also unifies neutrinos with the rest of matter into a single field. In addition to the elementary particles known at the time, this theory includes right-handed neutrinos.
After arriving in Bern in 1976, initially as a visiting professor, he elaborated an elegant mechanism in a paper wherein the existence of heavy right-handed neutrinos explains why the left-handed neutrinos we observe at low energies are so extremely light [2]. His discovery is known today as the Seesaw Mechanism.
Peter’s paper was, however, scarcely cited for the first 27 years following its publication, until a conference was held in Paris in 2004 to mark the 25th anniversary of the discovery of the Seesaw. Following an incident where Peter shouted at the conference organizers during a dinner in an elegant Parisian restaurant—pointing out that he had discovered the mechanism not 25, but 27 years prior—his work is now cited over 300 times per year and has since garnered over 5600 citations.
In the year of the Seesaw paper, Peter became an Associate Professor in Bern, and then a Full Professor in 1989. He attained emeritus status in 2006. His research covered many areas. Beyond unified theories and neutrino physics, he also conducted research in QCD, specifically regarding glueballs and scalar resonances. Together with Peter Grieder, he was also involved in the development of the DUMAND Experiment (Deep Underwater Muon And Neutrino Detector Project). From 1985–1987, he served as President of the Swiss Physical Society.
A standard curriculum vitae does not do justice to a colorful and unique character like Peter. We spent the drive to and from his funeral in Zurich trading anecdotes about our encounters with him. We believe that this would have pleased Peter, who often and happily told us anecdotes about his own encounters with famous physicists, such as Feynman and Gell-Mann.
When we informed a former postdoc about Peter’s death, he aptly remarked: "Things were certainly never boring with Peter!" We will hold him fondly in our memories.
Gilberto Colangelo, Thomas Becher, Universität Bern
[1] Annals of Physics. 93 (1–2): 193–266, (1975)
[2] Physics Letters B. 67 (4): 421–428 (1977)
[Published: March 2026]