Paul Townsend

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Paul Kingsley Townsend is a British theoretical physicist who specializes in string theory and its extensions.

Life

Townsend received his PhD in 1976 from Brandeis University with Howard Schnitzer ( The 1 / N Expansion of scalar field theories ). As a post-doctoral student he was at the State University of New York at Stony Brook , at CERN (as a UK Junior Fellow) and as a Joliot Curie Fellow at the École normal supérieure . In 1984 he became a lecturer at the DAMTP (Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics) at Cambridge University , where he is now a professor.

Townsend was one of the first to consider extending strings to more dimensions, membranes or branes . In 1987, together with Eric Bergshoeff and Ergin Sezgin , he looked at super membrane solutions in 11-dimensional supergravity . In total, he classified twelve extended objects with Anna Achucarro, Jonathan Evans and David Wiltshire in 1987, which are allowed in supersymmetric theories.

His work with Christopher Hull on string dualities in 1994 was one of the triggers of the Second Superstring Revolution . Specifically, they showed the duality of heterotic and type IIA string theory in six dimensions.

In 2000 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Mathematics Genealogy Project
  2. ↑ Previously, James Hughes, James Liu, and Joseph Polchinski showed the consistency of a theory of super membranes in 1986. However, as early as 1962 Paul Dirac investigated the quantum mechanics of extended objects .
  3. ↑ Bergshoeff, Sezgin, Townsend: Supermembranes and 11 dimensional supergravity . In: Physics Letters B , Volume 189, 1987, p. 75. the same: Properties of 11 dimensional supermembrane theory . In: Annals of physics , Volume 185, 1988, pp. 330-368
  4. ↑ Anna Achucarro, Jonathan Evans, Paul Townsend, David Wiltshire: Super p-branes . In: Physics Letters B , Volume 198, 1987, pp. 441-446
  5. ^ Hull, Townsend: Unity of superstring dualities . In: Nuclear Physics B , Volume 238, 1995, pp. 109-137, arxiv : hep-th / 9410167
personal data
SURNAME Townsend, Paul
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Townsend, Paul Kingsley (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British physicist
DATE OF BIRTH 20th century