Tom Banks

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Thomas "Tom" Banks (born April 19, 1949 , New York City ) is an American theoretical physicist who is particularly concerned with string theory.

life and work

Banks received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1973 . He was a professor at Rutgers University and is currently also a professor at the Santa Cruz Institute of Particle Physics (SCIPP) at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC).

Together with Stephen Shenker , Willy Fischler and Leonard Susskind , he formulated the matrix model in 1997 as a non-perturbation-theoretical formulation of string theory and M-theory .

In the mid-1980s, he and others developed a gauge-invariant form of string field theory.

In the 2000s he deals with applications of string theory / M-theory in cosmology. In contrast to most string theorists , he sees an asymptotically flat vacuum solution with broken supersymmetry , as it must exist in nature according to experiments, not as a vacuum solution of the M-theory, but as a consequence of a non-vanishing cosmological constant. Banks formulates a generalization of the holographic principle ( holographic spacetime ). In his view, elementary particle interactions at high energies, as well as the early phase of the development of the universe, are dominated by virtual black holes, with effects on predictions of high-energy experiments in the TeV range and in cosmology.

In 1999 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society . In 2011 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Fonts

  • The Cosmological Constant Problem . In: Physics Today , March 2004.
  • Modern Quantum Field Theory - a concise introduction . Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The Institute for Advanced Study. Annual Report 1983/84 . (PDF; 5.0 MB) p. 55
  2. ^ Symposium on the 60th Birthday of Fischler and Banks in 2009 at the University of California, Santa Cruz
  3. ^ University of Texas
  4. ↑ T. Banks, W. Fischler, SH Shenker, L. Susskind: M Theory As A Matrix Model: A Conjecture . In: Phys. Rev. D, Volume 55, 1997, p. 5112, arxiv : hep-th / 9610043
  5. ^ Banks: Cosmological breaking of Supersymmetry? 2000, arxiv : hep-th / 0007146 . Banks, Dine, Gorbatov: Is there a string theory landscape? 2003, arxiv : hep-th / 0309170 . Banks: Critique of pure string theory . 2003, arxiv : hep-th / 0306074 . He repeated his criticism of the landscape theory of string vacuums in Landskepticism . 2004, arxiv : hep-th / 0412129 .
  6. ^ Banks: Holographic Spacetime and its phenomenological implications . 2010, arxiv : 1004.2736 .
personal data
SURNAME Banks, Tom
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Banks, Thomas
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH April 19, 1949
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City