Leverhulme Visiting Professorship

A Fellowship has been awarded to the University of Nottingham to enable Bobby Acharya of the ICTP High Energy, Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics Section to be a Leverhulme Visiting Professor in 2011.

The professorship will allow Acharya to collaborate with Professor Ed Copeland of the University's School of Physics and Astronomy. Copeland founded a particle theory group in 2005, which works closely with both the astronomy group and the quantum gravity group in the School of Mathematical Sciences.

During Acharya's professorship, he and his collaborators will work with a model of particle physics and cosmology called the G2-MSSM, which Acharya developed with Professor Gordy Kane of the University of Michigan (USA). This model arises from M theory - arguably theoreticial physicists' most promising candidate for a unified model of all the fundamental forces including gravity. In the G2-MSSM model, the seven extra dimensions form a shape called a G2-Manifold. Acharya and Copeland will focus their research on the cosmological implications of the G2-MSSM.

In particular, the model predicts that the universe was matter-dominated for most of its early history, while most other models predict that radiation and other light particles were dominant. "With the Nottingham group, we are trying to understand some of the consequences of that," Acharya said.

The team will also study the universe's cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. Studying CMB, which is the thermal radiation that fills the entire universe with near-uniformity, is critical to cosmology, because any theory of the universe must explain both the radiation and its irregularities. Acharya said he hopes to understand how those irregularities formed within the framework of the G2-MSSM model.

One of The Leverhulme Visiting Professorship's objectives is to enhance the skills of students and academic staff at the host institution. During his stay in Nottingham, Acharya will give a special series of "Leverhulme lectures" on both M theory phenomenology and Large Hadron Collider physics.