Physics Faculty, Graduate Students To Gather At Institute For Advanced Study

More than 100 young physicists will attend Prospects in Theoretical Physics, an intensive summer program to be held on the Institute for Advanced Study campus June 30-July 11. Designed for advanced graduate students in physics and astrophysics, the program focus this year is Cosmology, Particles, and Strings.

Chiara Nappi, professor of physics at Princeton University, who chairs the organizing committee, says, “We view Prospects in Theoretical Physics as a service to the physics community at large, and as an additional tool to help train the next generation of graduate students interested in theoretical physics.” Other members of the organizing committee are John Bahcall, professor in the Institute’s School of Natural Sciences, and Princeton University professors Neta Bahcall, David Spergel, and Paul Steinhardt.

Lectures and seminars will be organized around mini-courses on, among other topics, thermal history, perturbation theory, particle phenomenology, nucleosynthesis, and string phenomenology. Participants, working at the interface of astrophysics, particle physics, and cosmology, will explore such questions as, “What is dark matter?” “How did the universe begin?” “Is there a cosmological constant?” and “Are there additional spacetime dimensions?”

Among the lecturers, in addition to those on the committee, are Juan Maldacena and Edward Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study, and Peter Meyers, Bohdan Paczynski, Lyman Page, P. James Peebles, Uros Seljak, Thomas Shutt, Suzanne Staggs, Michael Strauss, Licia Verde, and Herman Verlinde of Princeton University. Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, will host a session at the planetarium.

Other lecturers are Stephen Boughn, Haverford College; Arthur Kosowsky, Rutgers University; Paul Langacker, University of Pennsylvania; Arlie Petters, Duke University; and Neil Turok, Cambridge University.

The program, now in its second year, encourages the participation of women, minorities, and students from institutions with smaller programs in astrophysics and particle physics.

Prospects in Theoretical Physics is a program of the Institute for Advanced Study, and is supported by the National Science Foundation, the Concordia Foundation, the J. Seward Johnson, Sr., Charitable Trusts, and the Friends of the Institute for Advanced Study.

For more information call 609-734-8216 or see www.ias.edu/pitp.