Thibault Damour

Thibault Damour ( born February 7, 1951 in Paris ) is a French theoretical physicist who deals with general relativity, astrophysics, and string theory.

Life

Damour studied from 1970 to 1974 at the École supérieure normal, with a degree in physics in 1974 at the University of Paris VI (Diploma thesis on the theory of renormalization in quantum field theory). At the same time he was 1973/4 at the Institute Henri Poincaré in Paris and from 1974 to 1976 at Princeton University ( as an ESA Fellow ). In 1979 he received his doctorate from the University of Paris VI. on the theory of black holes. 1977-1981 he worked as a scientist at the CNRS at the group of Theoretical Astrophysics at the observatory at Meudon. He remained until 1992 when CNRS, since 1989 as a permanent professor at the IHES in Bures -sur -Yvette, near Paris.

Damour employed, inter alia, to with the theoretical analysis of tests for general relativity (AR), including as head of the theory team at STEP satellite experiment of the equivalence principle 1991 to 1996. He was also a member of the advisory boards for basic research at ESA and the French space agency. He examined, for example, the two-body problem in the AR with emission of gravitational waves, important in the first detection of these waves in binary systems with pulsar. He also dealt with cosmological aspects of string theory. With Bernard Julia, Hermann Nicolai and Marc Henneaux, he showed that the disappearance of the chaotic behavior of the BKL singularities ( according to Lifschitz, Belawin, Chalatnikow ) in general relativity ( with generalization in Kaluza-Klein theories of effective string theories ) in more than 10 space-time dimensions with the non-existence of hyperbolic Kac -Moody algebras in these higher dimensions related, which are responsible for the oscillatory chaotic behavior.

Rates and Memberships

Since 1994 he has been corresponding and full since 1999 member of the Académie des Sciences in Paris.