Tom Banks (physicist)

Thomas " Tom" Banks ( born April 19, 1949 New York City ) is an American theoretical physicist who is particularly concerned with string theory.

Life and work

Banks received his doctorate in 1973 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a professor at Rutgers University and is currently also a professor at the Santa Cruz Institute of Particle Physics ( SCIPP ) of the University of California, Santa Cruz ( UCSC ).

With Stephen Shenker, Willy Fischler and Leonard Susskind 1997, he formulated the matrix model as a nonperturbative formulation of string theory and M- theory.

The mid-1980s he developed with others, gauge-invariant form of the string field theory.

He deals in the 2000s with applications of string theory / M-theory in cosmology. He looks unlike most string theorists an asymptotically flat vacuum solution with broken supersymmetry, as she has to go present the experiments in nature, not as a vacuum solution of M- theory, but as a result of a non- vanishing cosmological constant .. Banks formulated to a generalization of the holographic principle ( Holographic Spacetime ). In his view, elementary particle interactions are dominated at high energies as well as the early stages of development of the universe of virtual black holes, with implications for predictions of high-energy experiments in the TeV range and cosmology.

Writings

• The Cosmological Constant Problem, Physics Today, March 2004
• Modern Quantum Field Theory - a concise introduction, Cambridge University Press 2008