Nicholas Manton
| Nicholas Manton | |
|---|---|
| Fields | |
| Institutions | |
| Alma mater | University of Cambridge (PhD)[1] |
| Thesis | Magnetic Monopoles and Other Extended Objects in Field Theory (1978) |
| Doctoral advisor | |
| Notable awards |
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Nicholas Stephen Manton FRS is a British mathematical physicist. He is a Professor of Mathematical Physics at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics of the University of Cambridge and a fellow of St John's College.[2][3]
Education
Manton earned his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1978, under the supervision of Peter Goddard. His thesis was entitled Magnetic Monopoles and Other Extended Objects in Field Theory.[1]
Research
Manton has made contributions to the theory of soliton-like particles in two and three dimensions. He calculated the forces between static and moving monopoles and vortices in gauge theories, leading to the geometrical idea of moduli space dynamics. This has been applied to the classical, quantum and statistical mechanics of solitons. He has also developed the theory of skyrmions as a soliton model of atomic nuclei.
He discovered the unstable sphaleron solution in the electroweak sector of the Standard Model of particle physics. The Higgs field is topologically twisted within a sphaleron. The sphaleron defines an energy scale for baryon and lepton number violation in the early universe — an energy scale within the range of the Large Hadron Collider. His other work includes the construction of a 10-dimensional theory containing supergravity and Yang–Mills theory, which is a low-energy limit of superstring theory.[2]
Awards and honours
Manton was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1996.[2]
References
- 1 2 Nicholas Manton at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- 1 2 3 "Nicholas Manton". London: Royal Society. One or more of the preceding sentences may incorporate text from the royalsociety.org website where "all text published under the heading 'Biography' on Fellow profile pages is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License." Royal Society Terms, conditions and policies at the Wayback Machine (archived February 20, 2016)
- ↑ Professor Nicholas Manton, University of Cambridge, retrieved 2016-03-10.