Michael Green (physicist)

Early life and education

Green was born the son of Genia Green and Absalom Green. He attended William Ellis School in London and Churchill College, Cambridge where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts with first class honours in theoretical physics (1967) and a PhD in elementary particle theory (1970).

Career

Following his PhD, Green did postdoctoral research at Princeton University (1970–72), Cambridge and the University of Oxford. Between 1978 and 1993 he was a Lecturer and Professor at Queen Mary College, University of London, and in July 1993 he was appointed John Humphrey Plummer Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge. On 19 October 2009 he was confirmed as the next Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, to succeed Stephen Hawking on 1 November 2009. In 2015 he was succeeded in that chair by Michael Cates, a specialist in colloids, gels, and particulate materials.

Research

After many years in collaboration with John Henry Schwarz, he co-discovered type II string theory in 1982, and later the anomaly cancellation in type I string theory in 1984. This latter insight, named the Green–Schwarz mechanism, initiated the First Superstring Revolution. Green has also worked on Dirichlet boundary conditions in string theory which have led to the postulation of D-branes and instantons.

Awards and honours

Green has been awarded the Paul Dirac and Maxwell Medals of the Institute of Physics, UK, the Dirac Medal of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (Trieste) and the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics of the American Physical Society. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1989. Green has co-authored more than 150 research papers.

His nomination for the Royal Society reads{{centred pull quote|Distinguished for his outstanding contributions to quantum field theory, especially the theory of superstrings. Green's early work was largely on duality in S-matrix theory. He was the first to prove an important result on the dual model – the cancellation of the leading divergences between boson and fermion loops. He has made significant contributions to the theory of phase transitions, but is best known for his trail-blazing work, much of it in collaboration with Schwarz, on superstring theory, including the first covariant formulation of the theory. The most important results are the proofs in 1984 and 1985 of anomaly cancellation for SO (32) and E8xE8 superstring theories and of infinity cancellation in the SO (32) case. These definitive papers initiated the explosive growth of superstring theory, now one of the most active and exciting areas of fundamental theoretical physics.}}

On 12 December 2013, Michael Green shared the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics with John Henry Schwarz "for opening new perspectives on quantum gravity and the unification of forces".

Selected publications

• Green, M., John H. Schwarz, and E. Witten. Superstring Theory. Vol. 1, Introduction. Cambridge Monographs on Mathematical Physics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988. .
• Superstring Theory. Vol. 2, Loop Amplitutes, Anomalies and Phenomenology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988. .

References

References

1. "GREEN, Prof. Michael Boris". Who's Who 2013, A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc, 2013; online edn, Oxford University Press.
2. {{MathGenealogy
3. (1984). "Covariant description of superstrings". Physics Letters B.
4. Green, M. B., Schwarz, J. H. (1982). "Supersymmetrical string theories." ''Physics Letters B'', '''109''', 444–448.
5. Henderson, Mark. (20 October 2009). "Stephen Hawking's successor as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics: Michael Green". [[The Times]].
6. (20 October 2009). "Michael Green elected 18th Lucasian Professor at the University of Cambridge". University of Cambridge.
7. {{Scopus
8. Green, Michael Boris. (1970). "Crossing symmetry and duality in strong interactions". University of Cambridge.
9. (April 1990). "Dirac Medal 1989 Presentation Ceremony Leaflet".
10. (1982). "Supersymmetrical string theories". Physics Letters B.
11. (1984). "Anomaly cancellations in supersymmetric D = 10 gauge theory and superstring theory". Physics Letters B.
12. (1997). "I-brane inflow and anomalous couplings on D-branes". Classical and Quantum Gravity.
13. (1997). "Effects of D-instantons". Nuclear Physics B.
14. (January 2018). "Michael Green Bibliography listing". [[SPIRES.
15. "Green, Michael Boris: Library and Archive Catalogue". [[The Royal Society]].