Augusto Sagnotti (born 1955) is an

Italian Italian(s) may refer to: * Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries ** Italians, a Romance ethnic group related to or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom ** Italian language, a Romance languag ...

theoretical physicist Theoretical physics is a branch of physics that employs mathematical models and abstractions of physical objects and systems to rationalize, explain, and predict natural phenomena. This is in contrast to experimental physics, which uses experi ...

at Scuola Normale (since 2005).

Biography

Sagnotti earned a

Laurea In Italy, the ''laurea'' is the main post-secondary academic degree. The name originally referred literally to the laurel wreath, since ancient times a sign of honor and now worn by Italian students right after their official graduation ceremo ...

in Electrical Engineering from the University of Rome "La Sapienza" in 1978 (advisors: Bruno Crosignani and Paolo Di Porto); and a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from

Caltech The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech) is a private university, private research university in Pasadena, California, United States. The university is responsible for many modern scientific advancements and is among a small g ...

in 1983 (advisor: John H. Schwarz). He was Post-Doctoral Fellow at Caltech (1983–84) and Miller Research Fellow at U.C. Berkeley (1984–86). Sagnotti was Junior Faculty at the University of Rome "Tor Vergata" from 1986 to 1994, then Associate Professor (1994–99) and Professor (2000-2005). His research activity has been devoted to the quantization of the

gravitational field In physics, a gravitational field or gravitational acceleration field is a vector field used to explain the influences that a body extends into the space around itself. A gravitational field is used to explain gravitational phenomena, such as ...

, to

String Theory In physics, string theory is a theoretical framework in which the point-like particles of particle physics are replaced by one-dimensional objects called strings. String theory describes how these strings propagate through space and intera ...

, to

Conformal Field Theory A conformal field theory (CFT) is a quantum field theory that is invariant under conformal transformations. In two dimensions, there is an infinite-dimensional algebra of local conformal transformations, and conformal field theories can sometime ...

and to Higher-Spin Gauge Fields. Sagnotti's main contribution to physics is perhaps the analysis of the 2-loop divergences in Einstein's theory of

General Relativity General relativity, also known as the general theory of relativity, and as Einstein's theory of gravity, is the differential geometry, geometric theory of gravitation published by Albert Einstein in 1915 and is the current description of grav ...

. Moreover, he was the first to propose, in 1987, that the

type I string theory In theoretical physics, type I string theory is one of five consistent supersymmetric string theories in ten dimensions. It is the only one whose strings are unoriented (both orientations of a string are equivalent) and the only one which perturba ...

can be obtained as an

orientifold In theoretical physics orientifold is a generalization of the notion of orbifold, proposed by Augusto Sagnotti in 1987. The novelty is that in the case of string theory the non-trivial element(s) of the orbifold group includes the reversal of the ...

of type IIB string theory, with 32 half- D9-branes added in the vacuum to cancel various anomalies and offered the elucidation of the key properties of orientifold constructions and of Conformal Field Theory on non-orientable surfaces. He also discovered the 10D "0B' string", including both

open and closed strings Open or OPEN may refer to: Music * Open (band), Australian pop/rock band * The Open (band), English indie rock band * ''Open'' (Blues Image album), 1969 * ''Open'' (Gerd Dudek, Buschi Niebergall, and Edward Vesala album), 1979 * ''Open'' (Go ...

, non supersymmetric but free of

tachyon A tachyon () or tachyonic particle is a hypothetical particle that always travels Faster-than-light, faster than light. Physicists posit that faster-than-light particles cannot exist because they are inconsistent with the known Scientific law#L ...

s. He has worked extensively on higher spins, arriving at a geometric formulation of their free field equations in terms of higher-spin curvatures. More recently, Sagnotti has been working on the proposal of a possible link between " brane supersymmetry breaking", and the onset of the inflationary phase, and on the exploration of some of its possible imprints on the CMB, in particular, the proposal that the low value of the CMB quadrupole and a first peak for l ~5 be a manifestation of the onset of the inflationary phase.

Awards and honors

Sagnotti received the Carosio Prize from the University of Rome “La Sapienza” in 1979, a Miller Fellowship from U.C. Berkeley in 1984, shared with Massimo Bianchi the 1994 SIGRAV Prize of the Italian Society for General Relativity and Gravitation, and received the Margherita Hack Prize for Science in 2014 for his work on the quantization of gravity and a

Humboldt Research Award The Humboldt Research Award (), also known informally as the Humboldt Prize, is an award given by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany to internationally renowned scientists and scholars who work outside of Germany in recognition of t ...

in 2018. He was also Andrejewski Lecturer at Humboldt Universitat in Berlin in 1999.

Books

* ''String Theory'', eds. C. Procesi and A. Sagnotti (Academic Press, 1988) * ''String Theory, Quantum Gravity and the Unification of the Fundamental Interactions'', eds. M. Bianchi, F. Fucito, V. Marinari and A. Sagnotti (World Scientific, 1992) * ''Classical and Quantum Statistical Physics'', by C. Heissenberg and A. Sagnotti (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2022)

References

External links

Scientific publications of Augusto Sagnotti
on

INSPIRE-HEP INSPIRE-HEP is an open access digital library for the field of high energy physics (HEP). It is the successor of the Stanford Physics Information Retrieval System (SPIRES) database, the main literature database for high energy physics since the 1 ...

{{DEFAULTSORT:Sagnotti, Augusto Living people 20th-century Italian physicists Academic staff of the University of Rome Tor Vergata 1955 births Italian string theorists String theorists Quantum gravity physicists Italian theoretical physicists People associated with CERN 21st-century Italian physicists California Institute of Technology fellows