Matthew J. Strassler is a theoretical physicist, science communicator, and educator known for the cascading gauge theory.
Strassler studied at Simon's Rock College and Princeton University, and further obtained his Ph.D from Stanford University under the supervision of Michael Peskin. [1] During his collegiate career he also performed concerts. [2]
Strassler was a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in 2002. [3] From 2000 until 2002 he taught at the University of Pennsylvania, [4] and then moved to the University of Washington until 2007. [5] [6] He left to a professorship at Rutgers University until 2013. [7] In 2013 he was a visiting scholar at Harvard, and in 2015, was an associate in the Physics Department. [8]
Strassler's scholarly publications has ranked h-factor of 44 as of May 2024 according to INSPIRE-HEP [9] and of 51 according to Google Scholar. [10] His publication, "Supergravity and a confining gauge theory: duality cascades and χSB-resolution of naked singularities", co-written with Igor Klebanov for the Journal of High Energy Physics in 2000, developed the cascading gauge theory. [11] His particle physics article "Echoes of a hidden valley at hadron colliders" (2006), co-written with Kathryn Zurek, [12] appeared in Physics Letters B . [13]
Strassler's physics-oriented blog, Of Particular Significance, often includes reality-checks on mainstream media coverage of physics news. [14] He has written for such outlets as New Scientist . [15] His book Waves in an Impossible Sea: How Everyday Life Emerges from the Cosmic Ocean was published in March 2024, by Basic Books. [16]
Strassler was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2007 "[f]or work extending the AdS/CFT gravity/gauge duality to QCD-like confining theories, and for insights into novel aspects of the physics of strongly coupled supersymmetric theories. [17]
M-theory is a theory in physics that unifies all consistent versions of superstring theory. Edward Witten first conjectured the existence of such a theory at a string theory conference at the University of Southern California in 1995. Witten's announcement initiated a flurry of research activity known as the second superstring revolution. Prior to Witten's announcement, string theorists had identified five versions of superstring theory. Although these theories initially appeared to be very different, work by many physicists showed that the theories were related in intricate and nontrivial ways. Physicists found that apparently distinct theories could be unified by mathematical transformations called S-duality and T-duality. Witten's conjecture was based in part on the existence of these dualities and in part on the relationship of the string theories to a field theory called eleven-dimensional supergravity.
In physics, string theory is a theoretical framework in which the point-like particles of particle physics are replaced by one-dimensional objects called strings. String theory describes how these strings propagate through space and interact with each other. On distance scales larger than the string scale, a string looks just like an ordinary particle, with its mass, charge, and other properties determined by the vibrational state of the string. In string theory, one of the many vibrational states of the string corresponds to the graviton, a quantum mechanical particle that carries the gravitational force. Thus, string theory is a theory of quantum gravity.
The Standard Model of particle physics is the theory describing three of the four known fundamental forces in the universe and classifying all known elementary particles. It was developed in stages throughout the latter half of the 20th century, through the work of many scientists worldwide, with the current formulation being finalized in the mid-1970s upon experimental confirmation of the existence of quarks. Since then, proof of the top quark (1995), the tau neutrino (2000), and the Higgs boson (2012) have added further credence to the Standard Model. In addition, the Standard Model has predicted various properties of weak neutral currents and the W and Z bosons with great accuracy.
In quantum chromodynamics (QCD), color confinement, often simply called confinement, is the phenomenon that color-charged particles cannot be isolated, and therefore cannot be directly observed in normal conditions below the Hagedorn temperature of approximately 2 terakelvin. Quarks and gluons must clump together to form hadrons. The two main types of hadron are the mesons and the baryons. In addition, colorless glueballs formed only of gluons are also consistent with confinement, though difficult to identify experimentally. Quarks and gluons cannot be separated from their parent hadron without producing new hadrons.
Supersymmetry is a theoretical framework in physics that suggests the existence of a symmetry between particles with integer spin (bosons) and particles with half-integer spin (fermions). It proposes that for every known particle, there exists a partner particle with different spin properties. There have been multiple experiments on supersymmetry that have failed to provide evidence that it exists in nature. If evidence is found, supersymmetry could help explain certain phenomena, such as the nature of dark matter and the hierarchy problem in particle physics.
In theoretical physics, supergravity is a modern field theory that combines the principles of supersymmetry and general relativity; this is in contrast to non-gravitational supersymmetric theories such as the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model. Supergravity is the gauge theory of local supersymmetry. Since the supersymmetry (SUSY) generators form together with the Poincaré algebra a superalgebra, called the super-Poincaré algebra, supersymmetry as a gauge theory makes gravity arise in a natural way.
Brane cosmology refers to several theories in particle physics and cosmology related to string theory, superstring theory and M-theory.
The Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) is an extension to the Standard Model that realizes supersymmetry. MSSM is the minimal supersymmetrical model as it considers only "the [minimum] number of new particle states and new interactions consistent with "Reality". Supersymmetry pairs bosons with fermions, so every Standard Model particle has a superpartner. If discovered, such superparticles could be candidates for dark matter, and could provide evidence for grand unification or the viability of string theory. The failure to find evidence for MSSM using the Large Hadron Collider has strengthened an inclination to abandon it.
In theoretical physics, the anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory correspondence is a conjectured relationship between two kinds of physical theories. On one side are anti-de Sitter spaces (AdS) that are used in theories of quantum gravity, formulated in terms of string theory or M-theory. On the other side of the correspondence are conformal field theories (CFT) that are quantum field theories, including theories similar to the Yang–Mills theories that describe elementary particles.
In quantum field theory, Seiberg duality, conjectured by Nathan Seiberg in 1994, is an S-duality relating two different supersymmetric QCDs. The two theories are not identical, but they agree at low energies. More precisely under a renormalization group flow they flow to the same IR fixed point, and so are in the same universality class. It is an extension to nonabelian gauge theories with N=1 supersymmetry of Montonen–Olive duality in N=4 theories and electromagnetic duality in abelian theories.
Pran Nath is a theoretical physicist working at Northeastern University, with research focus in elementary particle physics. He holds a Matthews Distinguished University Professor chair.
In theoretical physics, a cascading gauge theory is a gauge theory whose coupling rapidly changes with the scale in such a way that Seiberg duality must be applied many times.
In string theory, K-theory classification refers to a conjectured application of K-theory to superstrings, to classify the allowed Ramond–Ramond field strengths as well as the charges of stable D-branes.
Igor R. Klebanov is an American theoretical physicist. Since 1989, he has been a faculty member at Princeton University, where he is currently a Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics and the director of the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science. In 2016, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Since 2022, he is the director of the Simons Collaboration on Confinement and QCD Strings.
Joseph David Lykken is an American theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and, from July 1, 2014 to Sept 6, 2022, he was the Deputy Director of Fermilab. He is currently Director of Fermilab's Quantum Division.
David Paul Saltzberg is an experimental particle physicist and a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who is known for his science consultancy work on various television shows and films, such as The Big Bang Theory, Manhattan and Oppenheimer. His research involves high-energy collider physics and the radio detection of cosmic neutrinos, and in 2018, he was inducted as a fellow of the American Physical Society.
In strong interaction physics, light front holography or light front holographic QCD is an approximate version of the theory of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) which results from mapping the gauge theory of QCD to a higher-dimensional anti-de Sitter space (AdS) inspired by the AdS/CFT correspondence proposed for string theory. This procedure makes it possible to find analytic solutions in situations where strong coupling occurs, improving predictions of the masses of hadrons and their internal structure revealed by high-energy accelerator experiments. The most widely used approach to finding approximate solutions to the QCD equations, lattice QCD, has had many successful applications; It is a numerical approach formulated in Euclidean space rather than physical Minkowski space-time.
Kathryn M. Zurek is an American physicist and professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology. Her research interests primarily lie at the intersection of particle physics with cosmology and particle astrophysics. She is known for her theories on dark matter's "hidden valleys", also known as hidden sectors.
Probir Roy is an Indian particle physicist and a former professor at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. He is also a senior scientist of the Indian National Science Academy at Bose Institute and a former Raja Ramanna fellow of Department of Atomic Energy at Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics.
Zvi Bern is an American theoretical particle physicist. He is a professor at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
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