Nicholas Stephen Manton (born 2 October 1952 in the

City of Westminster The City of Westminster is a City status in the United Kingdom, city and London boroughs, borough in Inner London. It is the site of the United Kingdom's Houses of Parliament and much of the British government. It occupies a large area of cent ...

)Autobiographical Memoir
p.7 is a British

mathematical physicist Mathematical physics refers to the development of mathematical methods for application to problems in physics. The ''Journal of Mathematical Physics'' defines the field as "the application of mathematics to problems in physics and the developmen ...

. He is a Professor of Mathematical Physics at the

Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics Department may refer to: * Departmentalization, division of a larger organization into parts with specific responsibility Government and military *Department (administrative division), a geographical and administrative division within a country, ...

of the

University of Cambridge , mottoeng = Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts. Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge. , established = , other_name = The Chancellor, Masters and Schola ...

and a fellow of St John's College.Professor Nicholas Manton
University of Cambridge, retrieved 2016-03-10.

Education

Manton earned his PhD from the

in 1978, under the supervision of Peter Goddard. His thesis was entitled ''Magnetic Monopoles and Other Extended Objects in Field Theory''.

Research

Manton has made contributions to the theory of

soliton In mathematics and physics, a soliton or solitary wave is a self-reinforcing wave packet that maintains its shape while it propagates at a constant velocity. Solitons are caused by a cancellation of nonlinear and dispersive effects in the medium ...

-like particles in two and three dimensions. He calculated the forces between static and moving monopoles and vortices in

gauge theories 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 ...

, leading to the geometrical idea of ''

moduli space In mathematics, in particular algebraic geometry, a moduli space is a geometric space (usually a scheme or an algebraic stack) whose points represent algebro-geometric objects of some fixed kind, or isomorphism classes of such objects. Such spac ...

'' dynamics. This has been applied to the classical,

quantum In physics, a quantum (plural quanta) is the minimum amount of any physical entity (physical property) involved in an interaction. The fundamental notion that a physical property can be "quantized" is referred to as "the hypothesis of quantizati ...

and

statistical mechanics In physics, statistical mechanics is a mathematical framework that applies statistical methods and probability theory to large assemblies of microscopic entities. It does not assume or postulate any natural laws, but explains the macroscopic be ...

of solitons. He has also developed the theory of

skyrmions In particle theory, the skyrmion () is a topologically stable field configuration of a certain class of non-linear sigma models. It was originally proposed as a model of the nucleon by (and named after) Tony Skyrme in 1961. As a topological solito ...

as a soliton model of

atomic nuclei The atomic nucleus is the small, dense region consisting of protons and neutrons at the center of an atom, discovered in 1911 by Ernest Rutherford based on the 1909 Geiger–Marsden gold foil experiment. After the discovery of the neutron ...

. He discovered the unstable ''

sphaleron A sphaleron ( el, σφαλερός "slippery") is a static (time-independent) solution to the electroweak field equations of the Standard Model of particle physics, and is involved in certain hypothetical processes that violate baryon and lepto ...

'' solution in the electroweak sector of 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 ...

particle physics Particle physics or high energy physics is the study of fundamental particles and forces that constitute matter and radiation. The fundamental particles in the universe are classified in the Standard Model as fermions (matter particles) an ...

. The

Higgs field The Higgs boson, sometimes called the Higgs particle, is an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics produced by the quantum excitation of the Higgs field, one of the fields in particle physics theory. In the Stand ...

is topologically twisted within a sphaleron. The sphaleron defines an energy scale for

baryon In particle physics, a baryon is a type of composite subatomic particle which contains an odd number of valence quarks (at least 3). Baryons belong to the hadron family of particles; hadrons are composed of quarks. Baryons are also classified ...

and

lepton number In particle physics, lepton number (historically also called lepton charge) is a conserved quantum number representing the difference between the number of leptons and the number of antileptons in an elementary particle reaction. Lepton number ...

violation in the early universe — an energy scale within the range of the

Large Hadron Collider The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle collider. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008 in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and hundred ...

. His other work includes the construction of a 10-dimensional theory containing

supergravity In theoretical physics, supergravity (supergravity theory; SUGRA for short) 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 ...

and

Yang–Mills theory In mathematical physics, Yang–Mills theory is a gauge theory based on a special unitary group SU(''N''), or more generally any compact, reductive Lie algebra. Yang–Mills theory seeks to describe the behavior of elementary particles using th ...

, which is a low-energy limit of

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 theor ...

Awards and honours

Manton was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1996. One or more of the preceding sentences may incorporate text from the royalsociety.org website where "all text published under the heading 'Biography' on Fellow profile pages is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License."

Publications

*''Topological Solitons (Cambridge Monographs on Mathematical Physics)'', by N. Manton and P. Sutcliffe (Cambridge University Press, 2004) . *''The Physical World: An Inspirational Tour of Fundamental Physics'', by M. Manton and N. Mee (Oxford University Press, 2017) . *''Skyrmions - A Theory Of Nuclei'', by N. Manton (World Scientific, 2022) .

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Manton, Nicholas Stephen 1952 births Living people 20th-century British mathematicians 21st-century British mathematicians Fellows of the Royal Society Fellows of St John's College, Cambridge