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Peter van Nieuwenhuizen (Dutch: [ˈpeːtər vɑˈniu.ə(n)ˌɦœyzə(n)]; born October 26, 1938) is a Dutch theoretical physicist. He is a distinguished Professor at Stony Brook University in the United States. Widely known for his contributions to String theory, Supersymmetry, Supergravity and Field theory.
Peter van Nieuwenhuizen's research area is quantum field theory with applications to supergravity, supersymmetry, and string theory. He is one of the inventors of supergravity, which was discovered here at Stony Brook in 1976 (Nieuwenhuizen received the Dirac Medal and Prize in 1993).
PETER VAN NIEUWENHUIZEN. Distinguished Professor Emeritus/ Simons Lecturer. Physics and Astronomy. peter.vannieuwenhuizen@stonybrook.edu | (631)-632-7972, Math Tower 6-110. Research Group Website. The Department of Physics and Astronomy offers a diverse program and consistently ranks amongst the best and largest in the country.
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Whether the theory of supergravity, an attempt to unify all the forces of nature, is a true description of the world still hangs in the balance more than 40 years after it was proposed. Nonetheless it has now nabbed its founders one of the most lucrative awards in science: a shared US$3-million Special Breakthrough Prize in fundamental physics.
Supergravity1 was devised in 1976 by particle physicists Sergio Ferrara of CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland; Daniel Freedman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge; and Peter van Nieuwenhuizen of Stony Brook University in New York. The selection committee that awarded the prize chose to honour the theory, in part, for its impact on the understanding of ordinary gravity. Supergravity also underpins one of physicists’ favourite candidate ‘theories of everything’, string theory. The latter asserts that elementary particles are made of tiny threads of energy, but it remains unproven.
“Supergravity has been transcendently important in the development of physics for the past 40 years and in our exploration of what might lie beyond what we know about nature,” says string theorist Andrew Strominger at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who sat on the prize’s selection committee.
Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner launched the Breakthrough Prizes in 2012, and funders now include Google co-founder Sergey Brin and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. Awards are given out towards the end of each year, across a range of fields in science and mathematics. But the selection committee — picked from the pool of previous Breakthrough prizewinners — can make special awards to recognize exceptional work. In 2013, for example, Stephen Hawking won for his theory — also still untested experimentally — that black holes give off radiation.
By the early 1970s, physicists had constructed the standard model of particle physics, in which three of the four fundamental forces of nature are associated with their own particle: the electromagnetic force is carried by the particle of light, the photon; the strong force that binds atomic nuclei is mediated by the ‘gluon’; and the weak force that governs radioactive decay is associated with ‘W’ and ‘Z’ particles. All these particles have been observed experimentally. But the fourth fundamental force, gravity, resisted efforts to include it in the model. Supergravity was an early attempt to do so, combining particle physics with Einstein’s theory of gravity, general relativity.
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13 feb 2008 · View a PDF of the paper titled Lectures on instantons, by Stefan Vandoren and Peter van Nieuwenhuizen. This is a self-contained set of lecture notes on instantons in (super) Yang-Mills theory in four dimensions and in quantum mechanics.
Sergio Ferrara, Daniel Freedman, Peter van Nieuwenhuizen: 2020 Breakthrough Prize Award Presentation. The 2020 Breakthrough Prizes in Life Sciences, Fundamental Physics and Mathematics were...
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17 nov 2019 · The 2020 Breakthrough Prize Symposium was held November 4, 2019 at UC San Francisco and co-hosted by Stanford University and UC Berkeley. The daylong event included talks and panels featuring ...
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