Spending time in a small group with an internationally recognized physicist reviewing his work in supersymmetry is not the norm for most undergraduate college students.
For students engaged in the Long Island High Energy and Astrophysics Undergraduate Pathway (LEAP-UP) initiative at SUNY Old Westbury, though, that’s just what they experienced when Simone Giombi, professor of Physics at Princeton University, visited campus to discuss theoretical physics in general and, specifically Wilson loops as conformal defects.
Wilson loop operators are fundamental objects in any gauge theory, a class of quantum field theories that, for example, describe 3 of the 4 fundamental forces: the strong and weak forces, and electromagnetism.
"Seminars such as this one on most campuses are attended by faculty members, post-docs and graduate students,” said Matthew Lippert, associate professor of chemistry and physics who, along with his colleague, Assistant Professor John Estes, directs the LEAP UP program. "This was a great opportunity for our physics students to hear about cutting-edge research and become connected with the wider physics research community."
A member of the Princeton faculty since 2012, Giombi was recognized in 2017 by the Breakthrough Foundation with the prestigious “New Horizons in Physics Prize,” which is awarded alongside the “Breakthrough Prize” at what is popularly known as the annual “Oscars of Science” as created by founding sponsors Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, Julia and Yuri Milner, and Anne Wojcicki. Giombi was honored for his imaginative joint work on higher spin gravity and its holographic connection to a new soluble field theory.
Additionally, in 2014, he was awarded the SIGRAV Prize for “Classical and Quantum Gravity” by the Italian Society for General Relativity and Gravitational Physics.
The LEAP-UP physics seminar series is organized by Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Physics Andrew O’Bannon.
Funded via a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, LEAP-UP annually engages students pursuing the campus’ Physics degree to prepare for and take part in some of the most notable current research projects in the world involving leading scientists in Brookhaven National Laboratory’s (BNL) high-energy physics program. Along with the student-centric focus of LEAP-UP, the joint effort will create an active bridge between the theory expertise of the Old Westbury faculty in areas like string theory, high-energy theoretical physics, astrophysics, and radio astronomy with the experimental expertise of BNL’s researchers.