Howard Mason Georgi III (born January 6, 1947) is an American theoretical physicist and the

Mallinckrodt Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals is an American-Irish domiciled manufacturer of specialty pharmaceuticals (namely, adrenocorticotropic hormone), generic drugs and imaging agents. In 2017 it generated 90% of its sales from the U.S. healthcare system. ...

Professor of

Physics Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which relat ...

and Harvard College Professor at

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

. He is also Director of Undergraduate Studies in Physics. He was Co-Master and then Faculty Dean of

Leverett House Leverett House is one of twelve undergraduate residential Houses at Harvard University. It is situated along the north bank of the Charles River in Cambridge and consists of McKinlock Hall, constructed in 1925; two 12-story towers completed in 1 ...

with his wife, Ann Blake Georgi, from 1998 to 2018. His early work was in

Grand Unification A Grand Unified Theory (GUT) is a model in particle physics in which, at high energies, the three gauge interactions of the Standard Model comprising the electromagnetic, weak, and strong forces are merged into a single force. Although this ...

and gauge coupling unification within SU(5) and SO(10) groups (see

Georgi–Glashow model In particle physics, the Georgi–Glashow model is a particular grand unified theory (GUT) proposed by Howard Georgi and Sheldon Glashow in 1974. In this model the standard model gauge groups SU(3) × SU(2) × U(1) are combined into a single ...

Education

Georgi graduated from

Pingry School The Pingry School is a coeducational, independent school, independent, University-preparatory school, college preparatory country day school in New Jersey, with a Lower School (K–5) campus in the Short Hills, New Jersey, Short Hills neighbo ...

in 1964, graduated from Harvard College in 1967 and obtained his Ph.D. from

Yale University Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the worl ...

in 1971. He was Junior Fellow in the

Harvard Society of Fellows The Society of Fellows is a group of scholars selected at the beginnings of their careers by Harvard University for their potential to advance academic wisdom, upon whom are bestowed distinctive opportunities to foster their individual and intell ...

from 1973–76 and a Senior Fellow from 1982-1998.

Career

In early 1974 Georgi (with

Sheldon Glashow Sheldon Lee Glashow (, ; born December 5, 1932) is a Nobel Prize-winning American theoretical physicist. He is the Metcalf Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Boston University and Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics, Emeritus, at Harvard ...

) published the first grand unified theory (GUT), the Minimal SU(5)

. Georgi independently (alongside

Harald Fritzsch Harald Fritzsch (born 10 February 1943 in Zwickau, Germany, died 16 August 2022 in München) was a German theoretical physicist known for his contributions to the theory of quarks, the development of Quantum Chromodynamics and the great unifica ...

and

Peter Minkowski Peter Minkowski (born 10 May 1941) is a Swiss theoretical physicist. He is primarily known for his proposal, with Harald Fritzsch, of SO(10) as the group of a grand unified theory and for his independent proposal, more-or-less simultaneously with ...

) published a minimal

SO(10) In particle physics, SO(10) refers to a grand unified theory (GUT) based on the spin group Spin(10). The shortened name SO(10) is conventional among physicists, and derives from the Lie algebra or less precisely the Lie group of SO(10), which ...

GUT model in 1974. Georgi proposed an SU(5) GUT model with softly broken supersymmetry with

Savas Dimopoulos Savas Dimopoulos (; el, Σάββας Δημόπουλος; born 1952) is a particle physicist at Stanford University. He worked at CERN from 1994 to 1997. Dimopoulos is well known for his work on constructing theories beyond the Standard Model. ...

in 1981. This paper is one of the foundational works for the supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM). After the measurements of the three Standard Model gauge couplings at LEP I in 1991, it was shown that particle content of the MSSM, in contrast to the Standard Model alone, led to precision gauge coupling unification. He has since worked on several different areas of physics including composite Higgs models,

heavy quark effective theory In quantum chromodynamics, heavy quark effective theory (HQET) is an effective field theory describing the physics of heavy (that is, of mass far greater than the QCD scale) quarks. It is used in studying the properties of hadrons containing a sin ...

, dimensional deconstruction, little Higgs, and

unparticle In theoretical physics, unparticle physics is a speculative theory that conjectures a form of matter that cannot be explained in terms of particles using the Standard Model of particle physics, because its components are scale invariant. Howar ...

theories. Unparticle physics is a theory that there exists matter that cannot be explained in terms of particles, because its components are

scale invariant In physics, mathematics and statistics, scale invariance is a feature of objects or laws that do not change if scales of length, energy, or other variables, are multiplied by a common factor, and thus represent a universality. The technical ter ...

. Howard Georgi proposed this theory in the spring of 2007 in the papers "Unparticle Physics" and "Another Odd Thing About Unparticle Physics". Together with Vadim Kuzmin, Georgi received the

Pomeranchuk Prize The Pomeranchuk Prize is an international award for theoretical physics, awarded annually since 1998 by the Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP) from Moscow. It is named after Russian physicist Isaak Yakovlevich Pomeranchuk, w ...

of the Alikhanov Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP) in 2006. Georgi has published several books, one of which is ''Lie Algebras in Particle Physics'' published by World Scientific. He has also published ''The Physics of Waves'' and ''Weak Interactions and Modern Particle Theory''.

Honors

In 1995 he was elected to the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Natio ...

and received the

Sakurai Prize The J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics, is presented by the American Physical Society at its annual April Meeting, and honors outstanding achievement in particle physics theory. The prize consists of a monetary award ($10,000 U ...

; in 2000 he shared the

Dirac Medal The Dirac Medal is the name of four awards in the field of theoretical physics, computational chemistry, and mathematics, awarded by different organizations, named in honour of Professor Paul Dirac, one of the great theoretical physicists of the ...

with Jogesh Pati and

Helen Quinn Helen Rhoda Arnold Quinn (born 19 May 1943) is an Australian-born particle physicist and educator who has made major contributions to both fields. Her contributions to theoretical physics include the Peccei–Quinn theory which implies a corre ...

References

External links

Personal home page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Georgi, Howard 1947 births Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Living people Pingry School alumni 21st-century American physicists Harvard College alumni Yale University alumni Harvard University faculty J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics recipients Harvard Fellows Fellows of the American Physical Society