Gerardus 't Hooft

Gerardus ("Gerard") 't Hooft [ut-hooft] (The prefix ’t is pronounced as ‘ut’ and stands for ‘het’) (born July 5, 1946) is a professor in theoretical physics at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. He is a 1999 Nobel Prize laureate (together with Martinus Veltman) "for elucidating the quantum structure of electroweak interactions in physics". Asteroid 9491 Thooft is named in his honor; he has written a constitution for its future inhabitants. He was awarded the Lorentz Medal in 1986.

Important discoveries

  • A proof that gauge theories are renormalizable
  • Other results about gauge theory, confinement, and anomalies
  • 't Hooft was the first to realise that gauge theories simplify in the large N limit. He solved the theory in 1+1 dimensions, discovering an equation for the meson masses.[1] This topological expansion of large N gauge theories has proved important in the AdS/CFT correspondence in string theory
  • 't Hooft magnetic loop (related to Wilson loop by S-duality)
  • Instanton contributions to interactions of fermions ('t Hooft interaction)
  • Holographic principle (with Leonard Susskind) and other proposals about quantum gravity
  • Recent attempts to revive hidden variables in quantum mechanics

See also

't Hooft-Polyakov monopole

't Hooft symbol

Links

  1. ^ Coleman, Sidney (1988). Aspects of Symmetry. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521318270.

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