Michael Duff (physicist)

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Michael Duff (2003)

Michael J. Duff (born January 28, 1949 in Manchester ) is a British physicist.

Life

Duff attended Queen Mary College at the University of London (bachelor's degree in 1969) and received his doctorate in 1972 from Imperial College in London under Abdus Salam ( Problems in the Classical and Quantum Theories of Gravitation ). As a post-doctoral student he was at the ICTP in Trieste (1972/73), Oxford University , King's College and Queen Mary College in London (1976/77) and Brandeis University . From 1979 he was back at Imperial College, where he had been a lecturer since 1980 and as a reader of the faculty from 1985. From 1982 and 1984 to 1987 he was a member of the theory department at CERN , most recently as a senior physicist. In 1988 he became a professor at Texas A&M University (since 1992 as a Distinguished Professor ). In 1999 he became Oskar Klein Professor at the University of Michigan , where in 2001 he was the first director of the Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics . Then he went back to Imperial College, where he became professor in 2005 (since 2006 Abdus Salam Professor ) and head of the physics faculty. Duff was visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin , the UCSB , the Isaac Newton Institute , the University of Kyoto and the University of Cambridge , among others .

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society , the American Physical Society , the Institute of Physics , the Royal Society for the Arts . In 2004 he received the gold medal of the El Colegio Nacional in Mexico . For 2017 he was awarded the Dirac Medal of the Institute of Physics.

He is married and has a daughter and a son.

plant

Duff dealt with supergravity in 11 dimensions and its Kaluza-Klein compactification in the 1980s , at a time when the theory had largely been abandoned in favor of the superstring theory. In 1987, with Eric Bergshoeff , Chris Pope and Ergin Sezgin, he found a super membrane solution in 11-dimensional supergravity, which forms the edge of four-dimensional space-time when compacting in 7 dimensions ( super membrane at the end of the world ) With Takeo Inami, Kelly Stelle and Paul Howe, he showed shortly afterwards that one of the five superstring theories (which only exist in 10 dimensions), the Type IIA theory, could be derived from the 11-dimensional super-membrane solution of supergravity after compacting a spatial dimension. After Itzak Bars with Pope and Sezgin showed that the supermembrane (only in 11 dimensions) also had massless spin 2 excitations (gravitons) and that it could be free of anomalies in 11 dimensions (Bars, Pope), membrane solutions gained further support. Also in 1987, Duff put forward the conjecture that 5-branes and strings are dual to one another in 10 dimensions, which was supported in 1990 by Andrew Strominger , who found 5-branes as solitons in superstring theory. Further discoveries of dualities, in which Duff was involved, finally led to the postulation of the M-theory by Edward Witten in the mid-1990s, called by John Schwarz Second Superstring Revolution , in which the five superstring theories are combined together with other Bran suggestions.

In 1973 he and Derek Capper discovered the Weyl anomaly in quantum gravity.

Fonts

  • Editor: The World in Eleven Dimensions: Supergravity, Supermembranes and M-theory . Institute of Physics (IOP), Bristol 1999, ISBN 0-7503-0672-6 .
  • with R. Khuri, JX Lu: String Solitons . In: Physics Reports , Volume 259, 1995, pp. 213-326
  • with Pope, Nilsson: Kaluza-Klein-Supergravity . In: Physics Reports , Volume 130, 1986, p. 1
  • The theory formerly known as strings , Scientific American, February 1998, 155.198.210.128 ( Memento from July 3, 2011 in the Internet Archive ; PDF)
  • with Christine Sutton: The membrane at the end of the universe . In: New Scientist , June 30, 1988, Online ( Memento of July 3, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
  • A Layman's Guide to M-theory . Trieste Lectures 1998, arxiv : hep-th / 9805177

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ According to Duff's memories ( memento of July 3, 2011 in the Internet Archive ), the work arose from a bet between Salam and Hermann Bondi whether one could generate “the Schwarzschild solution from Feynman diagrams” , which Duff said, according to him
  2. ^ Duff, Michael James - Author profile . INSPIRE-HEP . Retrieved July 17, 2019.
  3. ↑ Bergshoeff, Duff, Pope, Sezgin: Supersymmetric Membrane vacua and singletons . In: Physics Letters B , Volume 199, 1987, p. 69
  4. ↑ Duff, Howe, Inami, passage: Superstrings in d = 10 from Supermembranes in d = 11 . In: Physics Letters B , 191, 1987, p. 70
  5. ↑ In terms of the duality first postulated by David Olive and Claus Montonen in 1977 between two models of the same theory, each with fundamental electrical and magnetic charges, S-duality
  6. ↑ When 4 of the 10 dimensions of the superstring theory are compacted, the 5 brane becomes a solitonic string (with T duality) and Duff, Jianxin Lu, Ruben Minasian, Joachim Rahmfeld and Ramzi Khuri found a series of papers from 1991 to 1995 Notes on an S-duality to the usual fundamental superstring in 6 dimensions (for example Duff, Lu Strings from Five Branes , Physical Review Letters, Volume 66, 1991, p. 1402). In 1994 Duff showed a connection from T-duality to S-duality in the string-string duality found by Paul Townsend and Christopher Hull between heterotic to type IIA string in 6 dimensions with further compactification to 4 dimensions.
  7. ↑ Duff. 20 years of the Weyl anomaly . arxiv : hep-th / 9308075
personal data
SURNAME Duff, Michael
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Duff, Michael J.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British physicist
DATE OF BIRTH January 28, 1949
PLACE OF BIRTH Manchester