Daniele Amati (born 11 August 1931, in Rome) [1] is an Italian theoretical physicist, specializing in particle physics. [2]
Amati received in 1952 from the University of Buenos Aires his Ph.D. in physics under Richard Gans with a thesis on ferroresonant circuits. In 1953–1954 Amati was a fellow at the Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas in Rio de Janeiro, where he took several graduate courses, including one taught by Richard Feynman. [3] From 1954 to 1959 Amati was an assistant at the University of Rome. Afterwards he was in the theory department of CERN and from 1973 to 1975 its director. Since 1986 he has been a professor at and, until 2001, director of the Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA). SISSA not only deals with physics but also with cognitive science and biology and is close to the International Center for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) located near Trieste. Under the auspices of SISSA, Springer Nature publishes the purely electronic Journal of High Energy Physics , founded by Amati in 1997. In the early to mid-1970s, Amati made the theory group at CERN a center of early string theory development, which was initiated as a result of a dual-resonance model by Gabriele Veneziano at CERN in 1968. [4] Among CERN's theory group, Victor Alessandrini in 1971 and Claud Lovelace in 1970 published on the multiloop amplitudes of the bosonic string. [5] [6] [7] Amati's 1989 article with Ciafaloni and Veneziano has over 1000 citations. [8]
Back in the early 1970s, Italian physicist Daniele Amati, characterized string theory as "part of 21st-century physics that fell by chance into the 20th-century." He meant that string theory had been invented by a process of tinkering, without physicists really grasping what was behind it. Amati surmised that a true understanding of the foundations of this remarkably rich theory would have to await the 21st century. [9]
Nathan "Nati" Seiberg is an Israeli American theoretical physicist who works on quantum field theory and string theory. He is currently a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, United States.
Alexander Markovich Polyakov is a Russian theoretical physicist, formerly at the Landau Institute in Moscow and, since 1990, at Princeton University, where he is the Joseph Henry Professor of Physics.
Montonen–Olive duality or electric–magnetic duality is the oldest known example of strong–weak duality or S-duality according to current terminology. It generalizes the electro-magnetic symmetry of Maxwell's equations by stating that magnetic monopoles, which are usually viewed as emergent quasiparticles that are "composite", can in fact be viewed as "elementary" quantized particles with electrons playing the reverse role of "composite" topological solitons; the viewpoints are equivalent and the situation dependent on the duality. It was later proven to hold true when dealing with a N = 4 supersymmetric Yang–Mills theory. It is named after Finnish physicist Claus Montonen and British physicist David Olive after they proposed the idea in their academic paper Magnetic monopoles as gauge particles? where they state:
There should be two "dual equivalent" field formulations of the same theory in which electric (Noether) and magnetic (topological) quantum numbers exchange roles.
Gabriele Veneziano is an Italian theoretical physicist widely considered the father of string theory. He has conducted most of his scientific activities at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, and held the Chair of Elementary Particles, Gravitation and Cosmology at the Collège de France in Paris from 2004 to 2013, until the age of retirement there.
Jonathan Richard Ellis is a British theoretical physicist who is currently Clerk Maxwell Professor of Theoretical Physics at King's College London.
The history of string theory spans several decades of intense research including two superstring revolutions. Through the combined efforts of many researchers, string theory has developed into a broad and varied subject with connections to quantum gravity, particle and condensed matter physics, cosmology, and pure mathematics.
Miguel Ángel Virasoro was an Argentine theoretical physicist. Virasoro worked in Argentina, Israel, the United States, and France, but he spent most of his professional career in Italy at La Sapienza University of Rome. He shared a name with his father, the philosopher Miguel Ángel Virasoro. He was known for his foundational work in string theory, the study of spin glasses, and his research in other areas of mathematical and statistical physics. The Virasoro-Shapiro amplitude, the Virasoro algebra, the super Virasoro algebra, the Virasoro vertex operator algebra, the Virasoro group, the Virasoro conjecture, the Virasoro conformal block, and the Virasoro minimal model are all named after him.
John (Jean) Iliopoulos is a Greek physicist. He is the first person to present the Standard Model of particle physics in a single report. He is best known for his prediction of the charm quark with Sheldon Glashow and Luciano Maiani. Iliopoulos is also known for demonstrating the cancellation of anomalies in the Standard model. He is further known for the Fayet-Iliopoulos D-term formula, which was introduced in 1974. He is currently an honorary member of Laboratory of theoretical physics of École Normale Supérieure, Paris.
Pierre Ramond is distinguished professor of physics at University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. He initiated the development of superstring theory.
David Ian Olive was a British theoretical physicist. Olive made fundamental contributions to string theory and duality theory, he is particularly known for his work on the GSO projection and Montonen–Olive duality.
André Neveu is a French physicist working on string theory and quantum field theory who coinvented the Neveu–Schwarz algebra and the Gross–Neveu model.
Riccardo Barbieri is an Italian theoretical physicist and a professor at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. He has written more than two hundred research papers in the field of theoretical elementary particle physics, and has been particularly influential in physics beyond the Standard Model.
Claud Lovelace was a theoretical physicist noted for his contributions to string theory, specifically, the idea that strings did not have to be restricted to the four dimensions of spacetime.
Augusto Sagnotti is an Italian theoretical physicist at Scuola Normale.
Stephan Narison is a Malagasy theoretical high-energy physicist specialized in quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the gauge theory of strong interactions. He is the founder of the Series of International Conferences in Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD-Montpellier) and of the Series of International Conferences in High-Energy Physics (HEPMAD-Madagascar).
Claus Kalevi Montonen is a Finnish theoretical physicist, most known for his work with British physicist David Olive in proposing the Montonen–Olive duality.
Tomasz Robert Taylor is a Polish-American theoretical physicist and faculty at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America. He obtained his PhD degree from the University of Warsaw, Poland in 1981 under the supervision of Stefan Pokorski. He is a descendant of John Taylor who originated from Fraserburgh in Scotland and emigrated to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth c.1676.
Anamaría Font Villaroel is a Venezuelan theoretical physicist and professor of the Central University of Venezuela (UCV). Her research has been focused on models about the primordial components of matter in the context of string theory.
Mikhail Yevgenyevich Shaposhnikov is a Soviet-born Swiss theoretical physicist and a professor at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). He is active in the fields of cosmology and particle physics.
Alain Rouet is a French theoretical physicist, entrepreneur, poet, and novelist.