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The Fundamental Physics Prize Foundation announced the 2014 winners of the Physics Frontiers Prizes and New Horizons in Physics Prizes on the 5th of November 2013. |
2014 Physics Frontiers Prize
The laureates of the 2014 Physics Frontiers Prize are:
- Joseph Polchinski, KITP/University of California, Santa Barbara, for his contributions in many areas of quantum field theory and string theory. His discovery of D-branes has given new insights into string theory and quantum gravity, with consequences including the AdS/CFT correspondence.
- Michael B. Green, University of Cambridge, and John H. Schwarz, California Institute of Technology, for opening new perspectives on quantum gravity and the unification of forces.
- Andrew Strominger and Cumrun Vafa, Harvard University, for numerous deep and groundbreaking contributions to quantum field theory, quantum gravity, string theory and geometry. Their joint statistical derivation of the Bekenstein-Hawking area-entropy relation unified the laws of thermodynamics with the laws of black hole dynamics and revealed the holographic nature of quantum spacetime.
Laureates of the 2014 Frontiers Prize now become nominees for the 2014 Fundamental Physics Prize. Those who do not win it will each receive $300,000 and will automatically be re-nominated for the next 5 years.
2014 New Horizons in Physics Prize
The laureates of 2014 New Horizons in Physics Prize are:
- Freddy Cachazo, Perimeter Institute, for uncovering numerous structures underlying scattering amplitudes in gauge theories and gravity.
- Shiraz Naval Minwalla, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, for his pioneering contributions to the study of string theory and quantum field theory; and in particular his work on the connection between the equations of fluid dynamics and Albert Einstein’s equations of general relativity.
- Vyacheslav Rychkov, CERN/Pierre-and-Marie-Curie University, for developing new techniques in conformal field theory, reviving the conformal bootstrap program for constraining the spectrum of operators and the structure constants in 3D and 4D CFT’s.
The New Horizons Prize is awarded to up to three promising researchers, each of whom will receive $100,000.
2014 Fundamental Physics Prize
The winner of the 2014 Fundamental Physics Prize will be announced on December 12, 2013 in San Francisco, along with the winners of the 2014 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences.