Dear Colleagues,

On Tuesday 20 March at 15:45, ICTP's Spring School on Superstring Theory and Related Topics will hold a memorial session in honour of the prominent theoretical physicist Joe Polchinski, who passed away in February 2018.

 

All are invited to attend. The 45-minute session will take place in the Budinich Lecture Hall, and will feature a brief overview of his oeuvre and tributes from his colleagues including Atish Dabholkar (ICTP), Ken Intriligator (UC San Diego), Igor Klebanov (Princeton), and Fernando Quevedo (ICTP). 

Polchinski was a professor at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He made wide ranging contributions to string theory and quantum field theory. His most influential work was his discovery of D-branes as a class of membranes in string theory which are crucial for establishing the existence of duality symmetries of string theory. D-branes have since led to deep and far-reaching  insights about the structure of gauge theories, string theory and black holes,  and have contributed to very fruitful interactions between physics and mathematics.

 

In 2008, he shared ICTP's Dirac Medal with Juan Maldacena and Cumrun Vafa <https://www.ictp.it/about-ictp/prizes-awards/the-dirac-medal/the-medallists/dirac-medallists-2008.aspx> for their fundamental contributions to superstring theory. According to their award citation, the three scientists profound achievements have helped to address outstanding questions like confinement of quarks and QCD mass spectrum from a new perspective and have found applications in practical calculations.