2008 DIRAC MEDAL AWARD CEREMONY
Professor K.R. Sreenivasan
Director of the
Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics
has the pleasure of inviting you to the
2008 Dirac Medal Award Ceremony on
Thursday, March 26, 2009
at 14.30 hrs.
in the Main Lecture Hall of the Leonardo Building
***
Programme
14.30 Welcome address by Professor K.R. Sreenivasan
Presentation of the awards
Dirac Lecture by Professor Juan M. Maldacena
The Theory at the End of the Universe
Dirac Lecture by Professor Joseph Polchinski
D-Branes and the Process of Theoretical Discovery
THE 2008 DIRAC MEDAL AND PRIZE
The 2008 Dirac Medal and Prize will be awarded to
Juan Martin Maldacena, Joseph Polchinski and Cumrun Vafa for
their fundamental contributions to
superstring theory. Their studies range from early work on orbifold
compactifications, physics and
mathematics of mirror symmetry, D-branes and black hole physics, as
well as gauge theory-gravity
correspondence. Their contributions in uncovering the strong-weak
dualities between seemingly different
string theories have enabled us to learn about regimes of quantum field
theory which are not accessible to
perturbative analysis. These profound achievements have helped us to
address outstanding questions like
confinement of quarks and QCD mass spectrum from a new perspective and
have found applications in
practical calculations in the fluid dynamics of quark gluon plasma.
The dualities have also led string theorists to conjecture that the
five different superstring theories in ten
space-time dimensions are manifestations of one underlying theory, yet
undiscovered, which has been
named the M-theory.