Paul Townsend

For other people named Paul Townsend, see Paul Townsend (disambiguation).
Not to be confused with Paul Townend.

Paul Kingsley Townsend (/ˈtaʊnzənd/; born 3 March 1951) is a British physicist, currently a Professor of Theoretical Physics in Cambridge University's Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics.[1] He is notable for his work on string theory.[2]

Education

He received his PhD from Brandeis University in 1976 for his dissertation The 1/N expansion of scalar field theories OCLC 22736707 supervised by Howard Joel Schnitzer. Since then he has over 320 publications.[3]

Work

In 1987, Eric Bergshoeff [de], Ergin Sezgin [de], and Paul Townsend showed that there are no superstrings in eleven dimensions (the largest number of dimensions consistent with a single graviton in supergravity theories),[4] but supermembranes.[5] In 1977 he was the first to formulate pure 4D N = 1 supergravity in anti-de Sitter space.[6]

Awards and honours

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in May 2000.[7]

References

  1. ^ "DAMTP>>People>>Professor P.K. Townsend".
  2. ^ Townsend Home Page at Cambridge
  3. ^ "INSPIRE-HEP Search".
  4. ^ This was demonstrated in: Werner Nahm, "Supersymmetries and their representations". Nuclear Physics B 135 no 1 (1978) pp 149-166, doi:10.1016/0550-3213(78)90218-3
  5. ^ E. Bergshoeff, E. Sezgin and P. K. Townsend, "Supermembranes and Eleven-Dimensional Supergravity," Phys. Lett. B 189: 75 (1987).
  6. ^ Townsend, P.K. (1977). "Cosmological constant in supergravity". Phys. Rev. D. 15 (10): 2802–2804. Bibcode:1977PhRvD..15.2802T. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.15.2802.
  7. ^ "Lists of Royal Society Fellows 1660-2007". London: The Royal Society. Archived from the original on 24 March 2010. Retrieved 19 July 2010.
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