Nicholas Stephen Manton (born 2 October 1952 in the City of Westminster)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 The University of Cambridge is a public collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209 and granted a royal charter by Henry III in 1231, Cambridge is the world's third oldest surviving university and one of its most pr ...

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 medi ...

-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 group ...

, leading to the geometrical idea of '' moduli space'' dynamics. This has been applied to the classical, quantum and statistical mechanics 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 lepton ...

'' solution in the electroweak sector of the Standard Model of

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 excited state, quantum excitation of the Higgs field, one of the field (physics), fields in particl ...

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 classif ...

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. 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 ...

, 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 t ...

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