FACULTY
Howard Georgi
Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics; Harvard College Professor;
Master of Leverett House; Head Tutor
PhD 1971, Yale University
Howard Georgi has ongoing research programs in several
areas of theoretical particle physics. The common elements
in these areas are symmetries and quantum field theory.
Georgi pioneered the subject of Grand Unified Theories,
both without (with Sheldon Glashow) and with supersymmetry
(with Savas Dimopoulos), invented the modern QCD quark
model (with Glashow and Alvaro De Rujula), the chiral
quark model (with former student Aneesh Manohar), and
the Heavy Quark Effective Theory.
The most important issue in particle physics today
is the question of what causes the spontaneous breaking
of the SU(2) x U(1) symmetry of the electroweak interactions.
Georgi (who with former student David Kaplan showed
how one could build composite Higgs bosons) studies
the possibility of strong coupling models and attempts
to find new mechanisms of symmetry breaking.
He also studies QCD, the formalism of effective field
theories, the strong CP problem, and the flavor puzzle.
Recently, Georgi has been exploring the properties of theories in which a scale-invariant sector of the world is weakly coupled to the standard model. In the scale invariant sector, energy and momentum is not bundled in particles, so Georgi dubbed this strange situation "unparticle physics." (http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~kats/papers/PRL101(2008)131603.pdf).
In addition, Georgi is interested in increasing the participation of women and minorities in science and is on a number of local and national committees that attempt to address this important issue.
- H. Georgi and S.L. Glashow, "Unity of all elementary particle forces." Phys. Rev. Lett. 32: 438 (1974).
- H. Georgi, H. Quinn, and S. Weinberg, "Hierarchy of interactions in unified gauge theories." Phys. Rev. Lett. 33: 451 (1974).
- H. Georgi, A. De Rujula, and S. Glashow, "Hadron masses in a gauge theory." Phys. Rev. D. 12: 147 (1975).
- H. Georgi and S. Dimopoulos, "Softly broken supersymmetry and SU(5)." Nucl. Phys. B. 193:150 (1981).
- H. Georgi and A. Manohar, "Chiral quarks and the nonrelativistic quark model." Nucl. Phys. B. 234: 189 (1984).
- H. Georgi, "An effective field theory for heavy quarks at low energies." Phys. Lett. B. 240: 447 (1990).
- H. Georgi, N. Arkani-Hamed, and A. Cohen, "(De)Constructing Dimensions." Phys. Rev. Lett. 86: 4757 (2001).
- H. Georgi, N. Arkani-Hamed, and A. Cohen, "Twisted Supersymmetry and the Topology of Theory Space." hep-th0109082.
- H. Georgi, "Fun with Higgsless Theories," hep-ph/0408067 (2004).