Theoretical Physics Honoured

A graduate of ICTP's Postgraduate Diploma Programme as well as several ICTP Dirac Medallists (one of whom is a member of ICTP's Scientific Council) and an ICTP Prize recipient are among the winners of the Fundamental Physics Prize Foundation's Physics Frontiers and New Horizons in Physics Prizes.

Winners of the Physics Frontiers Prize automatically become eligible for the Foundation's prestigious Fundamental Physics Prize, to be announced on 12 December. The annual Fundamental Physics Prize recognizes transformative advances in the field of fundamental physics and is worth US$3,000,000. It aims to provide recipients with more freedom and opportunity to pursue future accomplishments.

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 (a member of ICTP's Scientific Council), 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.

Those who do not win the Fundamental Physics Prize will each receive $300,000 and will automatically be re-nominated for the next 5 years.

Most of the laureates are ICTP Dirac Medallists. Joseph Polchinski won the medal in 2008, sharing the prize with Juan Maldacena and Cumrun Vafa for their fundamental contributions to superstring theory. Michael Green and John Schwarz shared the 1989 Dirac Medal, also for contributions to the development of superstring theory. Andrew Strominger has been a frequent lecturer at ICTP conferences on superstring theory.

The Foundation also announced the laureates of its 2014 New Horizons in Physics Prize, which is awarded to up to three promising researchers, each of whom receives $100,000. The winners are:

• Freddy Cachazo, Perimeter Institute, for uncovering numerous structures underlying scattering amplitudes in gauge theories and gravity. Cachazo is an alumnus of ICTP's Postgraduate Diploma Programme.
• 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. Minwalla received the 2010 ICTP Prize for his many outstanding contributions in the field of string theory and gauge/gravity duality.
• Vyacheslav Rychkov, CERN/Pierre-and-Marie-Curie University/École Normale Supérieure, 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.