Neil Turok

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Neil Turok
Neil Turok (1990)

Neil Geoffrey Turok (born November 16, 1958 in Johannesburg ) is a South African theoretical physicist and astrophysicist.

Life

Turok's parents were anti- apartheid activists. Turok studied at Churchill College of Cambridge University and was at the Imperial College in London with David Olive with the work string and solitons in gauge theories doctorate. He then went to the University of California, Santa Barbara and the Fermilab near Chicago . In 1994 he became a professor at Princeton University . In 1989 he received a research grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation ( Sloan Research Fellowship ). From 1997 he was professor for mathematical physics in Cambridge (England). In 2008 he was Executive Director of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario ( Canada ).

Turok was mainly concerned with cosmology , where he a. a. In 1996 with Robert Crittenden, when a large cosmological constant existed, he predicted correlations in the cosmic background radiation (CMB), which was confirmed by WMAP precision measurements of the anisotropies of the CMB in 2005.

Turok became known in the 1980s through assumptions that topological defects (such as cosmic strings ), so-called textures, could serve as an explanation for the formation of galaxies. However, this was initially refuted in 1997 by himself and his colleagues from the COBE observations. In 2007, however, this possibility was increased by the discovery of the CMB cold spot (a region of around 5 degrees in space - large compared to the typical fluctuations of 1 degree - and around 70 microkelvin colder than the mean CMB temperature) in the WMAP data revitalized. However, there are other explanations for this.

Turok is one of the authors of the theory of open inflation, in which an inflationary, open universe inside "bubbles" arises from the breakdown of a "false" (metastable) vacuum. In 1998, at the suggestion of Stephen Hawking , he investigated the emergence of open inflationary universes in the "no-boundary" description of quantum cosmology by James Hartle and Hawking, which led to the introduction of the Hawking-Turok instantaneous solutions (tunnel effect solutions) Describe the birth of inflationary open universes without hypothesizing a false vacuum. With Paul Steinhardt he later developed the theory of cyclic universes from a collision of branes in extended string theories ( eccyrotic universe ). According to Turok and Steinhardt, the development of a very small cosmological constant can also be understood within this model.

In 2003 he founded the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) in Muizenberg , which aims to train doctoral students in mathematics and theoretical physics from all over Africa. In 2008 he received the TED Prize. In 2014 he was elected a member of the Royal Society of Canada .

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References and comments

  1. ↑ Neil Turok in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)Template: MathGenealogyProject / Maintenance / id used
  2. ↑ Crittenden, Turok "Looking for a Cosmological Constant with the Rees-Sciama Effect", Physical Review Letters, Vol. 76, 1996, pp. 575-578
  3. ^ Spergel, Turok Textures of the Universe, Spectrum of Science, May 1992
  4. ↑ Ue-Li Pen, Uros Seljak, Turok “Power spectra in global defect theories of cosmic structure formation”, Physical Review Letters, Vol. 79, 1997, p. 1611, online
  5. ^ New Scientist, July 13, 2007, Online ( Memento of March 3, 2010 in the Internet Archive ), Turok et al. a. Science "A cosmic microwave background feature consistent with a cosmic texture", Vol. 318, 2007, p. 1612
  6. ^ Alfred Goldhaber, Martin Bucher, Turok, An open universe from inflation, Physical Review D, Vol. 52, 1995, 3124
  7. ↑ The walls of the bubbles expand at the speed of light, the universe in the bubble is open, with an initially inflationary expansion phase.
  8. ↑ This mechanism was previously investigated by Sidney Coleman and de Lucchia in the 1980s , the corresponding tunnel solution is called Coleman-de Lucchia Instanton.
  9. ↑ Hawking, Turok Open inflation, the 4 form and the cosmological constant, Physical Review Letters, 1998. Hawking on this 1998 ( Memento of December 28, 2008 in the Internet Archive ), description on the pages of the University of Cambridge
  10. ↑ RSC Class of 2014. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on July 7, 2015 ; accessed on September 13, 2016 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / rsc-src.ca
personal data
SURNAME Turok, Neil
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Turok, Neil Geoffrey (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION South African theoretical physicist and astrophysicist
DATE OF BIRTH November 16, 1958
PLACE OF BIRTH Johannesburg