Good fortune for CERN theorists

Awards aplenty for one CERN theorist as he wins the Amaldi Medal and is one of two theoreticians from CERN to be awarded the European Research Council’s ‘advanced grant’

Sergio Ferrara showing his Amaldi medal.

On 22 September at the congress of the Italian Society of General Relativity and Gravitation (SIGRAV), CERN theorist Sergio Ferrara was awarded the Amaldi Medal, the European prize for general relativity and gravitational physics.

He received the prestigious award for his continuing research into supergravity, a theory that combines the principles of supersymmetry and general relativity. Ferrara co-discovered supergravity in 1976 with two colleagues, Peter van Nieuwenhuizen and Daniel Freedman, but he received this recent award for his work on black holes in supergravity.

Ignatios Antoniadis.

Since its development, supergravity, or SUGRA, has played an important role in theoretical physics. If supersymmetry is proved to exist by the LHC then supergravity will be crucial to building consistent unified theories of particle physics and gravity.

The Amaldi Medal is not the only good fortune that Ferrara has had recently. Only two months earlier he was one of two CERN theorists to win a multi-million-euro grant from the European Research Council (ERC).

At the end of July the ERC announced the 105 winners of its ‘advanced research grants’. Out of these 105 grants only 4 were awarded in theoretical physics – two of which went to CERN theorists Sergio Ferrara and Ignatios Antoniadis.

Ferrara was awarded the grant through the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) in Italy. He will use it to set up a research group at the INFN to continue his research into supersymmetric field theories and their applications.

For Ignatios Antoniadis the research grant will allow him to set up a research group here at CERN and use experimental data from the LHC to explore the mass hierarchy problem.

Antoniadis hopes to test various theoretical approaches to the hierarchy problem, the problem of why the weak force is 1032 times stronger than gravity. An important component of his research will be ‘live’ phenomenology - the LHC data will allow him not only to test current theoretical predictions, but also to correct existing models and build new theories.