Paolo Di Vecchia (born October 29, 1942 in

Terracina Terracina is an Italian city and ''comune'' of the province of Latina, located on the coast southeast of Rome on the Via Appia ( by rail). The site has been continuously occupied since antiquity. History Ancient times Terracina appears in anci ...

) is an Italian theoretical physicist who works in the field of elementary particle physics,

quantum field theory In theoretical physics, quantum field theory (QFT) is a theoretical framework that combines classical field theory, special relativity, and quantum mechanics. QFT is used in particle physics to construct physical models of subatomic particles and ...

and

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 ...

Life

Di Vecchia graduated from the University of Rome with

Bruno Touschek Bruno Touschek (3 February 1921 – 25 May 1978) was an Austrian physicist, a survivor of the Holocaust, and initiator of research on electron-positron colliders. Biography Touschek was born and attended school in Vienna. In 1937, he was not ...

in 1966. As a post-doctoral researcher he worked at the Nuclear Research Center in

Frascati Frascati () is a city and ''comune'' in the Metropolitan City of Rome Capital in the Lazio region of central Italy. It is located south-east of Rome, on the Alban Hills close to the ancient city of Tusculum. Frascati is closely associated with ...

(where a permanent position was offered to him) and spent two years at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

and

CERN The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in a northwestern suburb of Gene ...

. In 1974 he became Assistant Professor at the

NORDITA The Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics, or NORDITA, or Nordita ( da, Nordisk Institut for Teoretisk Fysik), is an international organisation for research in theoretical physics. It was established as Nordisk Institut for Teoretisk Atomfys ...

in Copenhagen. In 1978 he came back for a year at CERN. In 1979 he became professor at the

Free University of Berlin The Free University of Berlin (, often abbreviated as FU Berlin or simply FU) is a public research university in Berlin, Germany. It is consistently ranked among Germany's best universities, with particular strengths in political science and t ...

and from 1980 to 1986 he taught at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal. From 1986 he has been a professor at NORDITA. Since NORDITA moved to Stockholm he spent half of the time there and half of the time at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen.

Work

In the 1970s Di Vecchia was one of the pioneers of string theory. Among other things, he formulated with

Lars Brink Lars Elof Gustaf Brink (born 12 November 1943 - died 29 October 2022) was a Swedish theoretical physicist. He made significant and well-cited contributions in supersymmetry, supergravity, superspace, and superstrings., and the connections amon ...

and others the locally supersymmetric Lagrangian for fermionic strings (i.e. those with fermionic excitations, half-integer spin). Previously, the Nambu-Goto action had been known for the bosonic string and different groups tried to construct a fermionic action. In 1972, along with Emilio Del Giudice and

Sergio Fubini Sergio Fubini (December 31, 1928 – January 6, 2005) was an Italian theoretical physicist. He was one of the pioneers of string theory. He was engaged in peace activism in the Middle East. Biography Fubini was born in Turin. In 1938, he fled t ...

, he introduced the "

DDF states DDF may refer to: Biology and medicine * Digestive Disorders Foundation, a British medical research charity *(N,N-dimethyl-amino)-benzenediazonium-fluoroborate, a photoaffinity probe that competes with acetylcholine for receptor binding * Sulfox ...

" scheme (also known as the "DDF construction"), which is named by the initials of the three scientists. Along with Stanley Deser and

Bruno Zumino Bruno Zumino (28 April 1923 − 21 June 2014) was an Italian theoretical physicist and faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley. He obtained his DSc degree from the University of Rome in 1945. He was renowned for his rigorous p ...

he formulated string theory as a two-dimensional analogue of the general theory of relativity. Afterwards he turned his investigations to instantons in quantum field theory and other . He returned to string theory in 1981 with the publication of the works by Alexander Polyakov who used the effect of Di Vecchia and colleagues for the quantization of strings, then known as the

Polyakov action In physics, the Polyakov action is an action of the two-dimensional conformal field theory describing the worldsheet of a string in string theory. It was introduced by Stanley Deser and Bruno Zumino and independently by L. Brink, P. Di Vecchia a ...

. In the 2000s he focused on the expansion of the

AdS/CFT correspondence In theoretical physics, the anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory correspondence, sometimes called Maldacena duality or gauge/gravity duality, is a conjectured relationship between two kinds of physical theories. On one side are anti-de Sitter s ...

to low supersymmetric and non-conformal gauge theories, the construction of four-dimensional effective Lagrangians for lower energies from the compactification of magnetised D-brane models,Di Vecchia, "Discussing string extensions of the Standard Model in D brane world", QCD 2008 Montepellier
and the high-energy scattering of closed strings in the framework of the theory of D-branes. Since 1994, he has been organizing Scandinavian conferences for string theory at NORDITA. In 2003 he became a member of the

Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters {{Infobox organization , name = The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters , full_name = , native_name = Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab , native_name_lang = , logo = Royal ...

Bibliography

* Locally supersymmetric action for the superstring in Andrea Cappelli, Elena Castellani, Filippo Colomo, Di Vecchia (ed.) '' The birth of string theory '', Cambridge University Press 2012
with Adam Swimmer ''The beginnings of string theory: a historical sketch'', ''LN Physics'' 737, 2008, 119

"The birth of string theory", ''LN Physics'' 737, 2008, 59-118
* with Emilio Del Giudice and Sergio Fubini, "General properties of the dual resonances model", ''Annals of Physics'' 70, 1972, 378-398. * with

, Stanley Deser,

Paul S. Howe, "Locally supersymmetry for spinning particles", ''Physics Letters B'', Volume 64, 1976, pp. 435-438 * Brink, Howe ''A locally supersymmetric and reparametrization invariant action for the spinning string'', Physics Letters B Volume 65, 1976, pp. 471-474 * Editor with JL Petersen: "Perspectives in String Theory." Proc. NORDITA / Niels Bohr Institute Meeting, Copenhagen October 1987, World Scientific, 1988 * with Antonella Liccardo: "Gauge theories from D branes" in Pierre Cartier et al. ''Frontiers in Number Theory , Physics and Geometry'', Volume 2, Springer, 2007
Arxiv

"An introduction to the AdS/CFT correspondence," Progress of Physics, Volume 48, 2000, 87-92

References

External links

Biography at the NORDITA
{{DEFAULTSORT:Di Vecchia, Paolo Italian string theorists 1942 births Living people People associated with CERN