Jacques Distler

Last updated
Jacques Distler
Born (1961-01-01) January 1, 1961 (age 63)
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
NationalityCanadian
Alma mater Harvard University
Scientific career
Fields physics, string theory
Institutions University of Texas at Austin

Jacques Distler (born January 1, 1961) is a Canadian-born American physicist working in string theory. He has been a professor of physics at the University of Texas at Austin since 1994.

Contents

Early life and education

Distler was born to a Jewish family in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where he attended Herzliah High School (Snowdon) along with noted Pediatric Researcher Daniel Wechsler.[ citation needed ] He attended Harvard University, also with Dan Wechsler, for both his bachelors and doctorate in physics. His 1987 thesis Compactified String Theories was supervised by Sidney Coleman. [1]

Physics career

Before going to Texas, he was assistant professor at Princeton University.

According to citation counts, his most influential publication is his 1989 paper on conformal field theory in two dimensions. His earliest paper is Gauge Invariant Superstring Field Theory, co-authored with André LeClair and published in 1986 in Nuclear Physics B.

He has studied the "landscape" of metastable vacua in string theory. In July 2005, he released a paper on this topic. [2] Professor Distler was a member of arXiv's physics advisory board. [3] [ failed verification ]

He has a blog Musings: Thoughts on Science, Computing, and Life on Earth, one of the first theoretical physics blogs in the world.[ citation needed ]

Personal life

Distler maintains a webpage dedicated to his father, who was born in Poland and escaped the German slave camps of World War II.

Notes

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edward Witten</span> American theoretical physicist

Edward Witten is an American mathematical and theoretical physicist. He is a professor emeritus in the school of natural sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Witten is a researcher in string theory, quantum gravity, supersymmetric quantum field theories, and other areas of mathematical physics. Witten's work has also significantly impacted pure mathematics. In 1990, he became the first physicist to be awarded a Fields Medal by the International Mathematical Union, for his mathematical insights in physics, such as his 1981 proof of the positive energy theorem in general relativity, and his interpretation of the Jones invariants of knots as Feynman integrals. He is considered the practical founder of M-theory.

String field theory (SFT) is a formalism in string theory in which the dynamics of relativistic strings is reformulated in the language of quantum field theory. This is accomplished at the level of perturbation theory by finding a collection of vertices for joining and splitting strings, as well as string propagators, that give a Feynman diagram-like expansion for string scattering amplitudes. In most string field theories, this expansion is encoded by a classical action found by second-quantizing the free string and adding interaction terms. As is usually the case in second quantization, a classical field configuration of the second-quantized theory is given by a wave function in the original theory. In the case of string field theory, this implies that a classical configuration, usually called the string field, is given by an element of the free string Fock space.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nathan Seiberg</span> Israeli American theoretical physicist

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Erik Verlinde</span> Dutch theoretical physicist

Erik Peter Verlinde is a Dutch theoretical physicist and string theorist. He is the identical twin brother of physicist Herman Verlinde. The Verlinde formula, which is important in conformal field theory and topological field theory, is named after him. His research deals with string theory, gravity, black holes and cosmology. Currently, he works at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Amsterdam.

In theoretical physics, type I string theory is one of five consistent supersymmetric string theories in ten dimensions. It is the only one whose strings are unoriented and the only one which contains not only closed strings, but also open strings.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alexander Markovich Polyakov</span> Russian theoretical physicist

Alexander Markovich Polyakov is a Russian theoretical physicist, formerly at the Landau Institute in Moscow and, since 1989, at Princeton University, where he is the Joseph Henry Professor of Physics Emeritus.

A conformal anomaly, scale anomaly, trace anomaly or Weyl anomaly is an anomaly, i.e. a quantum phenomenon that breaks the conformal symmetry of the classical theory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">George Chapline Jr.</span> American theoretical physicist

George Frederick Chapline Jr. is an American theoretical physicist, based at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. His most recent interests have mainly been in quantum information theory, condensed matter, and quantum gravity. In 2003 he received the Computing Anticipatory Systems award for a new interpretation of quantum mechanics based on the similarity of quantum mechanics and Helmholtz machines. He was awarded the E. O. Lawrence Award in 1982 by the United States Department of Energy for leading the team that first demonstrated a working X-ray laser.

Savas Dimopoulos is a particle physicist at Stanford University. He worked at CERN from 1994 to 1997. Dimopoulos is well known for his work on constructing theories beyond the Standard Model.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William A. Bardeen</span> American theoretical physicist

William Allan Bardeen is an American theoretical physicist who worked at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. He is renowned for his foundational work on the chiral anomaly, the Yang-Mills and gravitational anomalies, the development of quantum chromodynamics and the scheme frequently used in perturbative analysis of experimentally observable processes such as deep inelastic scattering, high energy collisions and flavor changing processes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything</span> Fringe theory of physics

"An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything" is a physics preprint proposing a basis for a unified field theory, often referred to as "E8 Theory", which attempts to describe all known fundamental interactions in physics and to stand as a possible theory of everything. The paper was posted to the physics arXiv by Antony Garrett Lisi on November 6, 2007, and was not submitted to a peer-reviewed scientific journal. The title is a pun on the algebra used, the Lie algebra of the largest "simple", "exceptional" Lie group, E8. The paper's goal is to describe how the combined structure and dynamics of all gravitational and Standard Model particle fields are part of the E8 Lie algebra.

In physics, matrix string theory is a set of equations that describe superstring theory in a non-perturbative framework. Type IIA string theory can be shown to be equivalent to a maximally supersymmetric two-dimensional gauge theory, the gauge group of which is U(N) for a large value of N. This matrix string theory was first proposed by Luboš Motl in 1997 and later independently in a more complete paper by Robbert Dijkgraaf, Erik Verlinde, and Herman Verlinde. Another matrix string theory equivalent to Type IIB string theory was constructed in 1996 by Ishibashi, Kawai, Kitazawa and Tsuchiya.

Warren Siegel is a theoretical physicist specializing in supersymmetric quantum field theory and string theory. He was a professor at the C. N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics at Stony Brook University. He retired in Fall of 2022.

Gary T. Horowitz is an American theoretical physicist who works on string theory and quantum gravity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Riccardo Rattazzi</span> Italian theoretical physicist and professor

Riccardo Rattazzi is an Italian theoretical physicist and a professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. His main research interests are in physics beyond the Standard Model and in cosmology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Daya Shankar Kulshreshtha</span> Indian theoretical physicist

Daya Shankar Kulshreshtha is an Indian theoretical physicist, specializing in formal aspects of quantum field theory, string theory, supersymmetry, supergravity and superstring theory, Dirac's instant-form and light-front quantization of field theories and D-brane actions. His work on the models of gravity focuses on the studies of charged compact boson stars and boson shells.

Michael Dine is an American theoretical physicist, specializing in elementary particle physics, supersymmetry, string theory, and physics beyond the Standard Model.

Olaf Lechtenfeld is a German mathematical physicist, academic and researcher. He is a full professor at the Institute of Theoretical Physics at Leibniz University, where he founded the Riemann Center for Geometry and Physics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alexander A. Voronov</span> Russian-American mathematician

Alexander A. Voronov is a Russian-American mathematician specializing in mathematical physics, algebraic topology, and algebraic geometry. He is currently a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Minnesota and a Visiting Senior Scientist at the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe.

Costas Christou Kounnas was a Cypriot theoretical physicist, known for his research on string theory, supersymmetry, supergravity, GUTs, and quantum chromodynamics.

References