Joseph Polchinski

Joseph Gerard Polchinski ( born May 16, 1954 in White Plains, New York) is an American theoretical physicist who deals mainly with string theory.

Polchinski attended high school in Tucson until 1971, and then studied at Caltech in Pasadena, where he earned his Bachelor's degree ( BS) made ​​in 1975. In 1980 he received his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley. After postdoctoral positions at the Stanford accelerator SLAC 1980-82 and 1982-1984 at Harvard University from 1984 to 1992 he was professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Since 1992 he is professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is also a member of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Polchinski is mainly for its introduction (1995 ) of the D - branes in string theory known ( higher-dimensional generalizations of strings on the surfaces of open strings end ). Previously, he was in 1986 with James Liu and James Hughes, the consistency of Super membrane theories. He also dealt with cosmological strings and AdS / CFT theory (which describes the equivalence of string theories in special manifolds with Yang-Mills theories on the edge of these manifolds ) and wrote a two-volume textbook on string theory.

In 2007 he received the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics and 2008, the Dirac Medal ( ICTP ). Since 2005 he is member of the National Academy of Sciences since 2002 and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 2013 and 2014 he received the Physics Frontiers Prize.

Writings

  • Jin Dai, Robert G. Leigh: New connections in between string theories, Modern Physics Letters A 4, 1989, p 2073 ( introduction of D- branes )
  • What is string theory? Les Houches Lectures 1994
  • D- Branes and Ramond - Ramond - Charges, Physical Review Letters 75, 1995, pp. 4724-4727
  • TASI Lectures on D- branes. 1996
  • String Theory, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1998 An introduction to the bosonic string (Volume 1), ISBN 0-521-63303-6
  • Superstring theory and beyond ( Volume 2 ), ISBN 0-521-63304-4
White Plains (New York) Tucson, Arizona Pasadena, California SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory D-Brane Dirac Prize arXiv Integrated Authority File
452349
de