ICTP Scientific Council Members Awarded New Physics Prize

Two of ICTP's Scientific Council members, along with several Dirac Medallists and long-time Centre collaborators, are among nine recipients of the inaugural Fundamental Physics Prize established by the Milner Foundation to recognize scientific breakthroughs in fundamental physics.

The Scientific Council awardees include Juan Maldacena (who received ICTP's Dirac Medal in 2008) and Ashoke Sen, a recipient of the ICTP Prize in 1989. Alan Guth and Andrei Linde (Dirac Medallists 2002), and Edward Witten (Dirac 1985) are also among the nine Fundamental Physics Prize awardees who have each received US $3 million for their accomplishments.

Another recipient, Nima Arkani-Hamed, was the inaugural speaker for ICTP's Salam Lecture Series in January 2012. Prize winner Nathan Seiberg has a long association with ICTP and has attended several Centre schools and workshops on string theory, while the remaining two awardees--Alexei Kitaev and Maxim Kontsevich--have also attended ICTP conferences.

All the recipients have agreed to serve on the Selection Committee of the Foundation to select recipients of future prizes.

The awardees were each cited for their specific contributions to fundamental physics:

• Nima Arkani-Hamed, Institute for Advanced Study: for original approaches to outstanding problems in particle physics.
• Alan Guth, Massachusetts Institute of Technology: for the invention of inflationary cosmology;
• Alexei Kitaev, California Institute of Technology: for the theoretical idea of implementing robust quantum memories and fault-tolerant quantum computation using topological quantum phases with anyons and unpaired Majorana modes.
• Maxim Kontsevich, Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies, France: for numerous contributions that have taken the fruitful interaction between modern theoretical physics and mathematics to new heights,
• Andrei Linde, Stanford University: for the development of inflationary cosmology, including the theory of new inflation;
• Juan Maldacena, Institute for Advanced Study: for his work on the gauge/gravity duality, relating gravitational physics in a spacetime and quantum field theory on the boundary of the spacetime, demonstrating that black holes and quantum mechanics are compatible, resolving the black hole information paradox;
• Nathan Seiberg, Institute for Advanced Study: for major contributions to our understanding of quantum field theory and string theory.
• Ashoke Sen, Harish-Chandra Research Institute, India: for uncovering striking evidence of strong-weak duality in certain supersymmetric string theories and gauge theories;
• Edward Witten, Institute for Advanced Study: for his contributions to physics spanning a wide range of topics including mathematics.

The Fundamental Physics Prize Foundation is a not-for-profit corporation dedicated to advancing our knowledge of the Universe at the deepest level by awarding annual prizes for scientific breakthroughs, as well as communicating the excitement of fundamental physics to the public. Yuri Milner, a Russian investor who established the foundation, said, "I am delighted to announce the launch of the Fundamental Physics Prize and welcome its first recipients. I hope the new prize will bring long overdue recognition to the greatest minds working in the field of fundamental physics, and if this helps encourage young people to be inspired by science, I will be deeply gratified."

For a full list of the winners and their citations, visit the Milner Foundation website.