Focus issue on gravity, supergravity, and fundamental physics: the Richard Arnowitt Symposium
Roland E. Allen · Physica Scripta · 2015
The papers in this special issue provide an excellent overview of central topics in fundamental physics, as the Large Hadron Collider and other frontier experiments extend their reach toward new discoveries.The reader will note that the authors are among the worldʼs leading experts and have played major roles in either developing the theoretical ideas or conducting the experiments to verify them.It is remarkable that the career of Richard Arnowitt has strong connections to essentially all of the topics discussed in this issue.His work overlapped most of the major developments in theoretical physics during the second half of the twentieth century.In 1953, at the age of twenty-five, he received his PhD with Julian Schwinger at Harvard University.He then had successive postdoctoral appointments at the University of California at Berkeley and the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study.After distinguished careers at Syracuse and Northeastern, Dick came to Texas A&M University in 1986, as the first Director of its Center for Theoretical Physics.He held this position for nine years, and additionally served as head of the physics department for six of those years.While establishing a world-class program in theoretical high-energy physics, he also demonstrated truly surprising breadth by hiring a series of fine experimentalists and theorists in condensedmatter, atomic, and nuclear physics, at all levels of seniority.The Texas A&M physics and astronomy department thus bears his indelible imprint.In this context, it should also be mentioned that he was himself a superb teacher and mentor.Dickʼs greater legacy, however, consists of a series of important contributions in both gravitation and particle physics.The famous ADM formulation of general relativity (named after Richard Arnowitt, Stanley Deser, and Charles Misner) is now 'part of the furniture' in the understanding of gravitational phenomena.It is a standard tool in theoretical and observational astrophysics, in the canonical formulation of quantum gravity, and in many other areas of fundamental physics, at both conceptual and concrete numerical levels.His work in high-energy physics is known to an equally large community.With Ali Chamseddine and Pran Nath, he developed the theory of supergravity grand unification and gravity-mediated supersymmetry breaking.Their minimal supergravity model has been of central importance in relating supersymmetric theories to experiment.And over several critical decades, he made many other influential contributions to high-energy physics, including specific proposals for the experimental detection of both supersymmetry and dark matter.His expertise and achievements bridged an artificial dichotomy into 'theory' and 'phenomenology', with significant work in both areas.During a crowded career, his research involved a remarkably wide range of fields, involving all the forces of nature and the various theoretical routes to unifying them.Although his attention was usually centered on the most fundamental physics, he also produced quite substantial work in atomic physics, with his early work on the hyperfine structure of hydrogen representing one of the first