Luis Álvarez-Gaumé Quotes

Luis Álvarez-Gaumé is a Spanish theoretical physicist who works on string theory and quantum gravity.

Luis Álvarez-Gaumé obtained his PhD in 1981 from Stony Brook University and worked from 1981 to 1984 at Harvard University as a Junior Fellow, before he moved to Boston University to work as a professor. From 1986 until 2016, Álvarez-Gaumé was a permanent member of the CERN Theoretical Physics unit. In 2016, he became the director of the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook.

In the 1980s, Álvarez-Gaumé had various important contributions to the field of string theory and its mathematical framework. Together with Edward Witten he showed in 1983 that quantum field theories generally have gravitational anomalies. Shortly after this, Michael Green and John Schwarz showed that such anomalies are avoided in various realizations of superstring theory. Álvarez-Gaumé is also known for a physical proof of the Atiyah–Singer theorem using supersymmetry.

His work spans a range of different subjects, including string perturbation theory at higher orders, quantum field theories on Riemann surfaces,

quantum groups, as well as dualities in string theory and black holes in string theory.

In the 1990s, Álvarez-Gaumé studied supersymmetry breaking at low energies . He has also co-authored a textbook on quantum field theory. Wikipedia

Luis Álvarez-Gaumé: 4 quotes 0 likes

Famous Luis Álvarez-Gaumé Quotes

“If Dirac’s idea restores the stability of the spectrum by introducing a stable vacuum where all negative energy states are occupied, the so-called Dirac sea, it also leads directly to the conclusion that a single-particle interpretation of the Dirac equation is not possible.”

Luis Álvarez-Gaumé

Source: An Invitation to Quantum Field Theory (2012), Ch. 1 : Why Do We Need Quantum Field Theory After All?

“In 1929 Oskar Klein stumbled into an apparent paradox when trying to describe the scattering of a relativistic electron by a square potential using Dirac’s wave equation. … In order to capture the essence of the problem without entering into unnecessary complication we will study Klein’s paradox in the context of the Klein– Gordon equation.”

Luis Álvarez-Gaumé

Source: An Invitation to Quantum Field Theory (2012), Ch. 1 : Why Do We Need Quantum Field Theory After All?

“Quantum field theory is the basic tool to understand the physics of the elementary constituents of matter. … It is both a very powerful and a very precise framework: using it we can describe physical processes in a range of energies going from the few millions electrovolts typical of nuclear physics to the thousands of billions of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). And all this with astonishing precision.”

Luis Álvarez-Gaumé

Source: An Invitation to Quantum Field Theory (2012), Ch. 1 : Why Do We Need Quantum Field Theory After All?

“In spite of the impressive success of quantum mechanics in describing atomic physics, it was immediately clear after its formulation that its relativistic extension was not free of difficulties.”

Luis Álvarez-Gaumé

Source: An Invitation to Quantum Field Theory (2012), Ch. 1 : Why Do We Need Quantum Field Theory After All?

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