After completing his education in Zwickau 1961, he became a soldier in the
Nationale Volksarmee of the
GDR. He studied physics at
Leipzig University from 1963 to 1968, where he completed his
Diplom under Hans-Juergen Treder. After fleeing to
West Germany, Fritzsch continued his studies at
LMU Munich where he finished his
Ph.D. under the supervision of
Heinrich Mitter. In 1970 Fritzsch visited the
Aspen Center for Physics, where he met
Murray Gell-Mann. They started a collaboration, first in Aspen, later at the California Institute of Technology. In 1971, they introduced the concept of the
colour charge quantum number which allowed them in collaboration with
William A. Bardeen to explain the decay rate of
pions. In the fall of 1971 Fritzsch and Gell-Mann moved to Geneva in Switzerland, where they worked together at
CERN. They proposed a
gauge theory for the
strong interaction, which now is called Quantum Chromodynamics. In September 1972 they moved back to Caltech. In 1975 Fritzsch published a paper together with
Peter Minkowski in which they proposed the symmetry group
SO(10) as the symmetry of the
Grand Unified Theory which has become a standard theory. In 1976 Fritzsch moved to CERN. After working for one year at the University of Wuppertal and the University of Bern, Fritzsch was appointed Professor at
LMU Munich in 1980. Fritzsch worked also on "composite models" of leptons and quarks, mass matrices of quarks and leptons, weak decays of heavy quarks, cosmology and the fundamental constants of physics. He retired in 2008 and died 16 August 2022 in
Munich. In 1971, Fritzsch married Brigitte Goralski. They had two children. == Works ==