Peter West (physicist)

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Peter West
FRS
Born4 December 1951
Bromley, Kent
NationalityBritish
EducationLiverpool College
Alma mater
  • Imperial College
    (BSc)
  • Imperial College
    (PhD)
AwardsChalmers 150th Anniversary Professor at the
Chalmers Institute of Technology (1992) Fellow of the Royal Society
(2006)
Scientific career
Fields
InstitutionsKing's College London
ThesisStudies in Supersymmetry (1976)
Doctoral advisorAbdus Salam[1]

Peter Christopher West

King's College, London and a fellow of the Royal Society.[2]

West was elected to the Royal Society in 2006; his citation read

Professor West is distinguished for the development of the theory of supersymmetry and its application to the construction of unified theories of all the fundamental particle interactions. His results have become cornerstones of the modern theory of superstrings and associated branes to which he continues to contribute actively.[3]

West has constructed supergravity theories in ten dimensions. These theories combine supersymmetry with general relativity, and they encode many of the properties of strings and branes.

West created a research group working on supersymmetry and strings in the Mathematics Department at King's College London.

Early life and education

Peter West completed his secondary school education at

Erwin Schrödinger International Institute for Mathematical Physics
in Vienna.

Works

Peter West is one of the pioneers of

quantum field theories, including the maximally supersymmetric N = 4 supersymmetric Yang–Mills theory,[9] which has 16 supersymmetries, theories with 8 supersymmetries[10] and 4 supersymmetries.[11][12][13]
The non-renormalization theorem plays a key role in determining how supersymmetry might be realised in nature and the above were the first discovered non-trivial conformal quantum field theories in four dimensions.

West constructed the two maximal supergravity theories that exist in ten dimensions; the IIA theory [14] and, with Paul Howe and John Henry Schwarz, the IIB theory.[15][16] These theories are the low energy effective actions, including non-perturbative effects, of the corresponding string theories and as a result they are one of the cornerstones in our understanding of string theory. Kellogg Stelle and West,[17] and at the same time Sergio Ferrara and Peter van Nieuwenhuizen,[18] found the supergravity theory in four dimensions which possesses an algebra with four supersymmetries which existed without the use of the equations of motion that is, they found the auxiliary fields that extended the first discovered supergravity theory.[19][20] Using this off-shell formulation West and Stelle,[21][22] together with the complementary work of Ferrara and van Nieuwenhuizen,[23] introduced a tensor calculus for supergravity and this led to the construction of the most general supersymmetric theory in four dimensions, which has played a crucial role in the construction of realistic supersymmetric models.

West, together with

Poincaré transformations
on Minkowski spacetime and made them local, that is, they took the translations to depend on spacetime. The gauging method of Chamseddine and West has been used to construct conformal supergravity theories and plays a key role in the formulation of higher spin theories.

André Neveu and West pioneered the development of gauge covariant string theory; including the free term [25] and the general features of the interacting theory.[26][27][28] A complete formulation of gauge covariant open string theory was found by Edward Witten.[29]

More recently West has proposed that

E11, as a symmetry.[30][31] He has shown that this theory contains all the maximal supergravity theories.[32]

Books

References

  1. ^ Peter West at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  2. ^ Smith, Alexandra (19 May 2006). "BP chief appointed Royal Society fellow". The Guardian. Retrieved 24 November 2016.
  3. ^ "Peter West". The Royal Society. Retrieved 24 November 2016.
  4. ^
    ISBN 978-0-19-954088-4. Retrieved 4 April 2022. {{cite book}}: |website= ignored (help
    )
  5. ^ "Peter West's entry on the Mathematics Genealogy Project". The Mathematics Genealogy Project. Retrieved 4 April 2022.
  6. ^ "King's College London profile page". King's College London Website. Retrieved 4 April 2022.
  7. ^ "Jubilee Professors at Chalmers University". Chalmers University of Technology Website. Retrieved 4 April 2022.
  8. doi:10.1016/0550-3213(76)90378-3
    .
  9. doi:10.1016/0370-2693(81)90326-9
    .
  10. doi:10.1016/0370-2693(83)91402-8
    .
  11. doi:10.1016/0370-2693(84)91881-1
    .
  12. doi:10.1016/0370-2693(84)91734-9
    .
  13. doi:10.1016/0550-3213(85)90397-9
    .
  14. doi:10.1016/0550-3213(84)90388-2
    .
  15. doi:10.1016/0370-2693(83)90168-5
    .
  16. doi:10.1016/0370-2693(83)90168-5
    .
  17. doi:10.1016/0370-2693(78)90669-X
    .
  18. doi:10.1016/0370-2693(78)90670-6
    .
  19. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.13.3214
    .
  20. doi:10.1016/0370-2693(76)90089-7
    .
  21. doi:10.1016/0370-2693(78)90581-6
    .
  22. doi:10.1016/0550-3213(78)90420-0
    .
  23. doi:10.1016/0370-2693(78)90893-6
    .
  24. doi:10.1016/0550-3213(77)90018-9
    .
  25. doi:10.1016/0370-2693(78)90893-6
    .
  26. doi:10.1016/0550-3213(86)90204-X
    .
  27. doi:10.1016/0370-2693(86)90962-7
    .
  28. doi:10.1016/0550-3213(87)90073-3
    .
  29. doi:10.1016/0550-3213(86)90155-0
    .
  30. S2CID 250872099
    .
  31. S2CID 118984824
    .
  32. ISBN 978-9813144866
    .
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