Dirac Medal (ICTP)
The Dirac Medal of the ICTP is given each year by the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in honour of physicist Paul Dirac. The award, announced each year on 8 August (Dirac's birthday), was first awarded in 1985. An international committee of distinguished scientists selects the winners from a list of nominated candidates. The Committee invites nominations from scientists working in the fields of theoretical physics or mathematics. The Dirac Medal of the ICTP is not awarded to Nobel Laureates, Fields Medalists, or Wolf Prize winners. However, several Dirac Medallists have subsequently won one of these awards. The medallists receive a prize of US$5,000. Recipients See also * List of physics awards * List of awards named after people This is a list of awards that are named after people. A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U - V W Y Z See also *Lists of awards *List of eponyms A ''list'' is any ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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International Centre For Theoretical Physics
The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) is an international research institute for physical and mathematical sciences that operates under a tripartite agreement between the Italian Government, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). It is located near the Miramare Park, about 10 kilometres from the city of Trieste, Italy. The centre was founded in 1964 by Pakistani Nobel Laureate Abdus Salam. ICTP is part of the Trieste System, a network of national and international scientific institutes in Trieste, promoted by the Italian physicist Paolo Budinich. Mission * Foster the growth of advanced studies and research in physical and mathematical sciences, especially in support of excellence in developing countries; * Develop high-level scientific programmes keeping in mind the needs of developing countries, and provide an international forum of scientific contact for scientist ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking
Spontaneous symmetry breaking is a spontaneous process of symmetry breaking, by which a physical system in a symmetric state spontaneously ends up in an asymmetric state. In particular, it can describe systems where the equations of motion or the Lagrangian obey symmetries, but the lowest-energy vacuum solutions do not exhibit that same symmetry. When the system goes to one of those vacuum solutions, the symmetry is broken for perturbations around that vacuum even though the entire Lagrangian retains that symmetry. Overview By definition, spontaneous symmetry breaking requires the existence of physical laws (e.g. quantum mechanics) which are invariant under a symmetry transformation (such as translation or rotation), so that any pair of outcomes differing only by that transformation have the same probability distribution. For example if measurements of an observable at any two different positions have the same probability distribution, the observable has translational symmetry. ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Superstring Theory
Superstring theory is an attempt to explain all of the particles and fundamental forces of nature in one theory by modeling them as vibrations of tiny supersymmetric strings. 'Superstring theory' is a shorthand for supersymmetric string theory because unlike bosonic string theory, it is the version of string theory that accounts for both fermions and bosons and incorporates supersymmetry to model gravity. Since the second superstring revolution, the five superstring theories are regarded as different limits of a single theory tentatively called M-theory. Background The deepest problem in theoretical physics is harmonizing the theory of general relativity, which describes gravitation and applies to large-scale structures (stars, galaxies, super clusters), with quantum mechanics, which describes the other three fundamental forces acting on the atomic scale. The development of a quantum field theory of a force invariably results in infinite possibilities. Physicists developed ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Nuclear Force
The nuclear force (or nucleon–nucleon interaction, residual strong force, or, historically, strong nuclear force) is a force that acts between the protons and neutrons of atoms. Neutrons and protons, both nucleons, are affected by the nuclear force almost identically. Since protons have charge +1 ''e'', they experience an electric force that tends to push them apart, but at short range the attractive nuclear force is strong enough to overcome the electromagnetic force. The nuclear force binds nucleons into atomic nuclei. The nuclear force is powerfully attractive between nucleons at distances of about 0.8 femtometre (fm, or 0.8×10−15 metre), but it rapidly decreases to insignificance at distances beyond about 2.5 fm. At distances less than 0.7 fm, the nuclear force becomes repulsive. This repulsion is responsible for the size of nuclei, since nucleons can come no closer than the force allows. (The size of an atom, measured in angstroms (Ã…, or 10â ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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David J
David John Haskins (born 24 April 1957, Northampton, Northamptonshire, England), better known as David J, is a British alternative rock musician, producer, and writer. He is the bassist for the gothic rock band Bauhaus and for Love and Rockets. He has composed the scores for a number of plays and films, and also wrote and directed his own plays, ''Silver for Gold (The Odyssey of Edie Sedgwick)'', in 2008, which was restaged at REDCAT in Los Angeles in 2011, and ''The Chanteuse and The Devil's Muse'' in 2011. His artwork has been shown in galleries internationally, and he has been a resident DJ at venues such as the Knitting Factory. David J has released a number of singles and solo albums, and in 1990 he released one of the first No. 1 hits on the then nascent Modern Rock Tracks charts, with "I'll Be Your Chauffeur". His most recent single, "The Day That David Bowie Died" entered the UK vinyl singles chart at number 4 in 2016. The track appears on his double album, ''Vaga ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Effective Action
In quantum field theory, the quantum effective action is a modified expression for the classical action taking into account quantum corrections while ensuring that the principle of least action applies, meaning that extremizing the effective action yields the equations of motion for the vacuum expectation values of the quantum fields. The effective action also acts as a generating functional for one-particle irreducible correlation functions. The potential component of the effective action is called the effective potential, with the expectation value of the true vacuum being the minimum of this potential rather than the classical potential, making it important for studying spontaneous symmetry breaking. It was first defined perturbatively by Jeffrey Goldstone and Steven Weinberg in 1962, while the non-perturbative definition was introduced by Bryce DeWitt in 1963 and independently by Giovanni Jona-Lasinio in 1964. The article describes the effective action for a single scalar ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Quantum Gravity
Quantum gravity (QG) is a field of theoretical physics that seeks to describe gravity according to the principles of quantum mechanics; it deals with environments in which neither gravitational nor quantum effects can be ignored, such as in the vicinity of black holes or similar compact astrophysical objects, such as neutron stars. Three of the four fundamental forces of physics are described within the framework of quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. The current understanding of the fourth force, gravity, is based on Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, which is formulated within the entirely different framework of classical physics. However, that description is incomplete: describing the gravitational field of a black hole in the general theory of relativity leads physical quantities, such as the spacetime curvature, to diverge at the center of the black hole. This signals the breakdown of the general theory of relativity and the need for a theory that goes b ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Bryce DeWitt
Bryce Seligman DeWitt (January 8, 1923 – September 23, 2004), was an American theoretical physicist noted for his work in gravitation and quantum field theory. Life He was born Carl Bryce Seligman, but he and his three brothers, including the noted ichthyologist Hugh Hamilton DeWitt, added "DeWitt" from their mother's side of the family, at the urging of their father, in 1950. In the early-1970s, this change of name so angered Felix Bloch that he blocked DeWitt's appointment to Stanford University and DeWitt and his wife Cecile DeWitt-Morette, a mathematical physicist, accepted faculty positions at the University of Texas at Austin. DeWitt served in World War II as a naval aviator. He died September 23, 2004 from pancreatic cancer at the age of 81. He is buried in France, and was survived by his wife and four daughters. Work He pioneered work in the quantization of general relativity and, in particular, developed canonical quantum gravity, manifestly covariant methods ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Stanley Deser
Stanley Deser (born 1931) is an American physicist known for his contributions to general relativity. Currently, he is emeritus Ancell Professor of Physics at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts and a senior research associate at California Institute of Technology. Biography Deser earned his B.A. (Summa cum laude) in 1949 at Brooklyn College in New York, and his master's degree 1950 at Harvard, where he also earned his doctorate in 1953, with a thesis entitled "Relativistic Two Body Interactions". From 1953 to 1955, he was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He was at the Niels Bohr Institute from 1955 to 1957, and a lecturer at Harvard from 1957 to 1958. He was an invited professor at the Sorbonne during 1966–1967 and 1971–1972, he held a visiting professorship at All Souls College in Oxford in 1977, and a Loeb Lectureship at Harvard in 1975. In the context of general relativity, he developed, with Richard Arnowitt and Charles Misner, the ADM form ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Julius Wess
Julius Erich Wess (5 December 19348 August 2007) was an Austrian theoretical physicist noted as the co-inventor of the Wess–Zumino model and Wess–Zumino–Witten model in the field of supersymmetry and conformal field theory. He was also a recipient of the Max Planck medal, the Wigner medal, the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, the Heineman Prize, and of several honorary doctorates. Life and work Wess was born in Oberwölz Stadt, a small town in the Austrian state of Styria. He received his Ph.D. in Vienna, where he was a student of Hans Thirring. His Ph.D. examiner was acclaimed quantum mechanics physicist Erwin Schrödinger. After working at CERN in Switzerland and at the Courant Institute of New York University, United States, he became a professor at the University of Karlsruhe. In later life, Wess was professor at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. After his retirement he worked at DESY in Hamburg. His doctoral students include Hermann Nicolai. Julius ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Gauge Theory
In physics, a gauge theory is a type of field theory in which the Lagrangian (and hence the dynamics of the system itself) does not change (is invariant) under local transformations according to certain smooth families of operations (Lie groups). The term ''gauge'' refers to any specific mathematical formalism to regulate redundant degrees of freedom in the Lagrangian of a physical system. The transformations between possible gauges, called ''gauge transformations'', form a Lie group—referred to as the ''symmetry group'' or the ''gauge group'' of the theory. Associated with any Lie group is the Lie algebra of group generators. For each group generator there necessarily arises a corresponding field (usually a vector field) called the ''gauge field''. Gauge fields are included in the Lagrangian to ensure its invariance under the local group transformations (called ''gauge invariance''). When such a theory is quantized, the quanta of the gauge fields are called '' gauge bosons ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Chiral Anomaly
In theoretical physics, a chiral anomaly is the anomalous nonconservation of a chiral current. In everyday terms, it is equivalent to a sealed box that contained equal numbers of left and right-handed bolts, but when opened was found to have more left than right, or vice versa. Such events are expected to be prohibited according to classical conservation laws, but it is known there must be ways they can be broken, because we have evidence of charge–parity non-conservation ("CP violation"). It is possible that other imbalances have been caused by breaking of a ''chiral law'' of this kind. Many physicists suspect that the fact that the observable universe contains more matter than antimatter is caused by a chiral anomaly. Research into chiral symmetry breaking laws is a major endeavor in particle physics research at this time. Informal introduction The chiral anomaly originally referred to the anomalous decay rate of the neutral pion, as computed in the current algebra of the ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |