Michael Duff (physicist)
Michael J. Duff ( born January 28, 1949 in Manchester ) is a British physicist.
Life
Duff visited the Queen Mary College, London University ( Bachelor's degree 1969) and in 1972 at Imperial College in London with Abdus Salam doctorate ( Problems in the Classical and Quantum Theories of Gravitation ). As a post-doctoral researcher at the ICTP in Trieste, he was (1972 /73), the University of Oxford, King's College and Queen Mary College in London (1976 /77) and Brandeis University. From 1979, he was back at Imperial College, where he belonged as a reader of the faculty since 1980 as a lecturer and from 1985. 1982 and 1984 to 1987 he was a member of the Theory Division of CERN, most recently as Senior Physicist. In 1988 he became a professor at Texas A & M University ( since 1992 as a Distinguished Professor ). He was Oskar Klein Professor at the University of Michigan in 1999 and was there in 2001, the first director of the Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics. Then he went back to the Imperial College, where he in 2005 Professor (since 2006 Professor Abdus Salam ) and Chairman of the Physics faculty was. Duff has been a visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin, UCSB, the Isaac Newton Institute, Kyoto University and the University of Cambridge.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the American Physical Society, the Institute of Physics, the Royal Society for the Arts. In 2004 he received the Gold Medal of El Colegio Nacional in Mexico.
He is married and has a daughter and a son.
Work
Duff worked in the 1980s with supergravity in 11 dimensions and the Kaluza-Klein compactification, in a time when the theory was in favor of the superstring theory largely abandoned. It took place in 1987 with Eric Bergshoeff, Chris Pope and Ergin Sezgin a super membrane solution in 11 dimensional supergravity, which forms the edge of the four-dimensional space - time with compactification in 7 dimensions (Super membrane at the end of the world ) with Takeo Inami, Kelly point and Paul Howe, he showed briefly that one of the five superstring theories ( which only exist in 10 dimensions ), the type IIA theory, from the 11 dimensional super membrane solution of supergravity was derived, after compactification of a spatial dimension. After then, Itzhak Bars showed with Pope and Sezgin that the super membrane (only in 11 dimensions ) and massless spin 2 excitations had ( gravitons ) and she could be free in 11 dimensions anomalies (bars, Pope) won membrane solutions further support. Also In 1987, Duff on the assumption that 5 - brane and strings in 10 dimensions are dual to each other, which was created in 1990 supported by Andrew Strominger, who found 5 - brane as a soliton in the superstring theory. Further discoveries of dualities, what Duff was involved, eventually led to John Black Second Superstring Revolution mentioned postulation of M-theory by Edward Witten mid-1990s, in which the five superstring theories are unified together with other sectors suggestions.
In 1973, he discovered with Derek Capper the Weyl anomaly in quantum gravity.
Writings
- Publisher: The World in Eleven Dimensions: Supergravity, Super Membranes and M -theory, Institute of Physics ( IOP), Bristol 1999, ISBN 0750306726th
- With R. Khuri, JX Lu string soliton Physics Reports, Volume 259, 1995, pp. 213-326
- With Pope, Nilsson Kaluza-Klein supergravity, Physics Reports, Volume 130, 1986, p.1
- The theory formerly known as strings, Scientific American, February 1998, online, pdf
- A Layman 's Guide to M -theory, Trieste Lectures 1998 online