Paul Kingsley Townsend (; born 3 March 1951) is a British physicist, currently a Professor of Theoretical Physics in Cambridge University's Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics.[ Townsend Home Page at Cambridge]
Education
He received his PhD from Brandeis University in 1976 for his dissertation
The 1/N expansion of scalar field theories supervised by Howard Joel Schnitzer. Since then he has over 320 publications.
Work
In 1987, , , and Paul Townsend showed that there are no superstrings in eleven dimensions (the largest number of dimensions consistent with a single graviton in
supergravity theories),
[This was demonstrated in: Werner Nahm, "Supersymmetries and their representations". Nuclear Physics B 135 no 1 (1978) pp 149-166, ] but
supermembranes.
[E. Bergshoeff, E. Sezgin and P. K. Townsend, "Supermembranes and Eleven-Dimensional Supergravity," Phys. Lett. B 189: 75 (1987).] In 1977 he was the first to formulate pure 4D N = 1 supergravity in anti-de Sitter space.
Awards and honours
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in May 2000.
External links
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(lecture by Paul Townsend)
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(Workshop: Octonions and the Standard Model, Perimeter Institute, 2021)
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(Workshop: Octonions and the Standard Model, Perimeter Institute, 2021)
