Lisa Randall

Lisa Randall ( born June 18, 1962 in New York City ) is an American professor of theoretical physics at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is regarded as a leading theoretical physicist and expert on particle physics, string theory and cosmology.

Life

Lisa Randall is the middle of three daughters of a representative and a teacher from Queens, New York. Lisa Randall's younger sister, Dana Randall, is a professor of computer science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Randall made ​​1980 their high school degree at the scientifically oriented Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, New York.

She studied at Harvard University ( BA 1983), where she in 1987 at Howard Georgi with the work " Enhancing the Standard Model " doctorate. After that she worked as a post-doc at the University of California, Berkeley ( as a President's Fellow ) and 1989/ 90 at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. 1990/91 she was a Junior Fellow at Harvard and was an Assistant Professor in 1991 and 1995, associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). 1998 Randall was appointed as the first woman appointed to the chair of theoretical physics at Princeton University, where she taught until 2000. At the same time it was from 1998 to 2001 professor of physics at MIT. In July 2001, she moved again to Harvard University on a chair of theoretical physics.

Lisa Randall is considered as the most-cited high-energy physicist in the world for the period from 1999 to 2004. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (since 2004), the National Academy of Sciences ( since 2008) and the American Physical Society that her Julis Edgar Lilienfeld Prize awarded in 2007. This was followed by awards such as the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship, the National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award, the DOE Outstanding Junior Investigator Award, and the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. In 2003, she received the Premio Caterina Tomassoni e Felice Pietro Chisesi Award from the University La Sapienza in Rome. In 2006 she was awarded the Klopsted Award of the American Association of Physics Teachers ( AAPT ). Time magazine leads Randall in the Time 100 list of the 100 most influential people of 2007.

Research priorities

For several years Randall is working on expanding the two competing models of string theory and tries to ensure that the fabric of reality to explain. It brings together relativity, quantum mechanics, gravity and this extended string theory and developed a model of interpenetrating, overlapping and warping " multiverse ".

One of her most important work to date is the Randall - Sundrum model, which they published together with Raman Sundrum 1999. Your 2005 published popular science book Warped Passages (see below) was added to the list of the hundred most notable books of the year 2005, the New York Times.

Lisa Randall's thought structure

Together with her ​​co-worker Raman Sundrum Randall describes a five-dimensional model of the universe. According to Albert Einstein, space and time are not necessarily flat, but bent and distorted. Randall's calculations show that the space-time could be so badly bent that all areas will be inaccessible to us. This goes so far that a fifth dimension could exist, we do not see because of this curvature. The observable world is then just one of many islands in the middle of a higher -dimensioned space. Only a few inches further, there could be another universe that is out of our reach because we are trapped in our four dimensions.

A version of the universe model includes two so-called branes. The word is derived from " membrane ". Branes are low dimensional islands, which are embedded in a higher-dimensional space. Randall explained by the example of a shower curtain: A curtain is a two-dimensional brane in a three dimensional space. In Randall's model the universe consists of two branes and a fifth dimension, which is sandwiched in between. On the one brane we sit. All matter, all forces are bound to our brane - like drops of water on the shower curtain. That's why we could learn nothing about a second brane, although it could be extremely close, just a fraction of a millimeter.

There are but after Randall's idea a force that, in contrast to the other three forces ( the strong interaction, the weak interaction and the electromagnetic force ) penetrate the fifth dimension: the force of gravity. Randall indicates that she had developed the model therefore, to explain a particular nature of gravity, namely their incredible weakness. In their model, the vast majority of gravity near the other brane is concentrated, and there they would be as strong as the other forces. But because the space is curved, we see only a faint echo of it. That would be a natural explanation for the weakness of gravity.

The Randall - Sundrum model tries the hierarchy problem by introducing a single additional dimension - that distinguishes the model of the string theories - to solve. New and exciting for science is that Randall has formulated experiments that could detect the extra dimension. With the confirmation of the Randall - Sundrum - Radions by the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator but do not count the time being.