The article by Wally Greenberg in the spring 2015 Institute
Letter mentions the anomalous axial current triangle diagram
and describes its connection with counting quark degrees of
freedom. This derives from a calculation I did when a
long-term...
In recent decades, physicists and astronomers have discovered
two beautiful Standard Models, one for the quantum world of
extremely short distances, and one for the universe as a whole.
Both models have had spectacular success, but there are also...
Following the discovery in July of a Higgs-like boson—an effort
that took more than fifty years of experimental work and more than
10,000 scientists and engineers working on the Large Hadron
Collider—Juan Maldacena and Nima Arkani-Hamed, two...
“It is indeed an endless cycle of imagination and concentration, of divergence and convergence, of playing and thinking that determines the rhythm of science and scholarship,” writes Robbert Dijkgraaf on the occasion of becoming the Institute’s ninth Director and first Leon Levy Professor. “The Institute is devoted to creating and supporting these experiences.”
Before dawn on July 4, CERN scientists announced the discovery
of a new particle consistent with the boson predicted nearly fifty
years ago by Peter Higgs. He gave one of his first seminars on his
theory at the Institute at the invitation of...
In the twentieth century, mathematicians developed a deep
theory of knots, which was revolutionized by the discovery of the
Jones polynomial—a way to calculate a number for every knot—by
Vaughan F. R. Jones in the early 1980s. Below, Edward
Witten...
One of the remarkable discoveries in astrophysics has been the
recognition that the material we see and are familiar with, which
makes up the earth, the sun, the stars, and everyday objects, such
as a table, is only a small fraction of all of the...
In the public lecture “The World’s Largest Experiment,” Nathan
Seiberg, Professor in the School of Natural Sciences, discusses the
Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the potential discoveries it may
yield—among them, new insights about the origin of...
