Paul Townsend

Paul Kingsley Townsend is a British theoretical physicist who deals with string theory and its extensions.

Townsend in 1976 at Brandeis University with Howard Schnitzer PhD (The 1 / N expansion of scalar field theories ). As a post - graduate student he was at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, CERN ( as UK Junior Fellow ) and as Joliot Curie Fellow at the Ecole Normale Superieure. In 1984 he was Lecturer at DAMTP ( Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics ), University of Cambridge, where he is a professor today.

Townsend was one of the first, the extensions of strings on more dimensions, membrane or brane considered. With Eric Bergshoeff and Ergin Sezgin he looked at 1987 Super membrane solutions in 11 -dimensional supergravity. Overall, he classified with Anna Achucarro, Jonathan Evans and David Wiltshire 1987 twelve extended objects that are allowed in supersymmetric theories.

His work with Christopher Hull via string dualities in 1994 was one of the triggers of the Second Superstring Revolution .. Specifically, they showed the duality of hetero Phonetic and type IIA string theory in six dimensions.

In 2000 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society.