Katrin Becker (born

Gelsenkirchen Gelsenkirchen (, , ; wep, Gelsenkiärken) is the 25th most populous city of Germany and the 11th most populous in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia with 262,528 (2016) inhabitants. On the Emscher River (a tributary of the Rhine), it lies ...

, Germany, October 7, 1967) is a theoretical physicist and textbook author specializing in

string theory 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 interac ...

. She is a professor of physics at

Texas A&M University Texas A&M University (Texas A&M, A&M, or TAMU) is a public, land-grant, research university in College Station, Texas. It was founded in 1876 and became the flagship institution of the Texas A&M University System in 1948. As of late 2021, T ...

Life and work

Becker earned her diploma under

Werner Nahm Werner Nahm (; born 21 March 1949) is a German theoretical physicist, with the status of professor. He has made contributions to mathematical physics and fundamental theoretical physics. Life and work Werner Nahm attended Gymnasium Philipp ...

at the

University of Bonn The Rhenish Friedrich Wilhelm University of Bonn (german: Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn) is a public research university located in Bonn, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It was founded in its present form as the ( en, Rhine U ...

where she also received her doctorate in 1994 with a dissertation titled, ''Strings, black holes and conformal field theory''. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the

Kavli Institute The Kavli Foundation, based in Los Angeles, California, is a foundation that supports the advancement of science and the increase of public understanding and support for scientists and their work. The Kavli Foundation was established in Decembe ...

at the

University of California, Santa Barbara The University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara or UCSB) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Santa Barbara County, California, Santa Barbara, California with 23,196 undergraduate ...

(UCSB) and then a senior research fellow at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) with

John Henry Schwarz John Henry Schwarz (; born November 22, 1941) is an American theoretical physicist. Along with Yoichiro Nambu, Holger Bech Nielsen, Joël Scherk, Gabriele Veneziano, Michael Green, and Leonard Susskind, he is regarded as one of the founders of s ...

. She became an assistant professor at the

University of Utah The University of Utah (U of U, UofU, or simply The U) is a public research university in Salt Lake City, Utah. It is the flagship institution of the Utah System of Higher Education. The university was established in 1850 as the University of De ...

before moving to

in 2005. Becker deals with string theory, for example in the development of models that make predictions for the

Standard Model The Standard Model of particle physics is the theory describing three of the four known fundamental forces (electromagnetism, electromagnetic, weak interaction, weak and strong interactions - excluding gravity) in the universe and classifying a ...

and realize models of inflation in cosmology. She worked closely with her sister, physicist Melanie Becker (also a professor at Texas A&M), with whom she wrote a popular string theory textbook along with John Henry Schwarz. A general description of Katrin Becker's physics research has been published:

In our quest for the fundamental laws of nature, we are led to wonder how to construct a theory of
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 vi ...
, a theory that reconciles gravity with quantum physics. Prof. K. Becker works on
string theory 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 interac ...
. This is a
quantum theory Quantum theory may refer to: Science *Quantum mechanics, a major field of physics *Old quantum theory, predating modern quantum mechanics * Quantum field theory, an area of quantum mechanics that includes: ** Quantum electrodynamics ** Quantum ch ...
that predicts gravitation instead of contradicting it and it could be the unified theory of nature. It is a fascinating and unique framework.

In 2003, she received a

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship The Sloan Research Fellowships are awarded annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation since 1955 to "provide support and recognition to early-career scientists and scholars". This program is one of the oldest of its kind in the United States. ...

, and in 2005, a Radcliffe Fellowship. In 2017, she received the Bush Excellence Award for Faculty in International Research

Personal life

Katrin Becker was born in Gelsenkirchen, Germany to Ingrid and Karl-Hans Becker on October 7, 1967. She grew up in Malaga, Spain, with her older sister Melanie Becker, and the two sisters were recruited to Texas A&M in 2005 as part of a faculty reinvestment program. Katrin survived her sister and collaborator Melanie who died in 2020 after a long fight with cancer.

Selected works

* Katrin Becker, Daniel Butter, William D. Linch, and Anindya Sengupta. “Components of eleven-dimensional supergravity with four off-shell supersymmetries.”

Journal of High Energy Physics The ''Journal of High Energy Physics'' is a monthly peer-reviewed open access scientific journal covering the field of high energy physics. It is published by Springer Science+Business Media on behalf of the International School for Advanced Stu ...

, 2021(7), Jul 2021. * Katrin Becker, Melanie Becker, Daniel Butter, William D. Linch, and Stephen Randall. “Five-dimensional supergravity in N = 1/2 superspace.” Journal of High Energy Physics, 2020(3), Mar 2020. * Katrin Becker and Daniel Butter. “4D = 1 Kaluza-Klein superspace.” Journal of High Energy Physics, 2020(9), Sep 2020. * Katrin Becker, Melanie Becker, Daniel Butter, and William D. Linch. “N = 1 supercurrents of eleven-dimensional supergravity.” Journal of High Energy Physics, 2018(5), May 2018. * Katrin Becker, Melanie Becker, William D. Linch, Stephen Randall, and Daniel Robbins. “All Chern-Simons invariants of 4D, N = 1 gauged superform hierarchies.” Journal of High Energy Physics, 2017(4), Apr 2017. * Katrin Becker, Melanie Becker, John Schwarz: ''String Theory and M-Theory. A modern introduction''. Cambridge University Press 2007, ISBN 0521860695 (book)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Becker, Katrin Living people 1967 births University of Bonn alumni Texas A&M University faculty String theorists Women physicists 21st-century German physicists 21st-century German scientists 21st-century German women scientists