Burt Ovrut is an American

theoretical physicist Theoretical physics is a branch of physics that employs mathematical models and abstractions of physical objects and systems to rationalize, explain and predict natural phenomena. This is in contrast to experimental physics, which uses experimen ...

best known for his work on

heterotic string theory In string theory, a heterotic string is a closed string (or loop) which is a hybrid ('heterotic') of a superstring and a bosonic string. There are two kinds of heterotic string, the heterotic SO(32) and the heterotic E8 × E8, abbreviate ...

. He is currently Professor of Theoretical High Energy Physics at the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

. Ovrut earned his Ph.D. in physics at the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...

in 1978. His doctoral advisors were

Benjamin W. Lee Benjamin Whisoh Lee (; January 1, 1935 – June 16, 1977), or Ben Lee, was a Korean-born American theoretical physicist. His work in theoretical particle physics exerted great influence on the development of the standard model in the late 20th ce ...

and

Yoichiro Nambu was a Japanese-American physicist and professor at the University of Chicago. Known for his contributions to the field of theoretical physics, he was awarded half of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2008 for the discovery in 1960 of the mechanism ...

, and his thesis was on an Sp(4) x U(1) Theory of the Weak and Electromagnetic Interactions. Ovrut is one of those who pioneered the use of

M-theory 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 ...

to explain the

Big Bang The Big Bang event is a physical theory that describes how the universe expanded from an initial state of high density and temperature. Various cosmological models of the Big Bang explain the evolution of the observable universe from the ...

without the presence of a singularity. Together with Justin Khoury, Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok, he introduced the notion of the

Ekpyrotic Universe The ekpyrotic universe () is a physical cosmology, cosmological model of the early universe that explains the origin of the large-scale structure of the cosmos. The model has also been incorporated in the cyclic universe theory (or ekpyrotic cycl ...

, "... a cosmological model in which the hot big bang universe is produced by the collision of a brane in the bulk space with a bounding orbifold plane, beginning from an otherwise cold, vacuous, static universe". Recently Burt Ovrut and his collaborators constructed a Calabi-Yau compactification that reproduces the

Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model 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 inimumnumber of new particle states and new interactions con ...

without any exotics. .

References

External links

Professor Burt Ovrut University of Pennsylvania Home Page

* ttps://web.archive.org/web/20050421200438/http://libarynth.f0.am/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Libarynth/MembraneTheory Membrane Theory Living people Year of birth missing (living people) 21st-century American physicists University of Chicago alumni University of Pennsylvania faculty American string theorists Fellows of the American Physical Society {{US-physicist-stub