Zvi Bern, professor of physics, has been selected to receive the American Physical Society’s 2014 J.J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics, awarded annually to recognize and encourage outstanding achievement in particle theory.
He will receive the award at the society's meeting in April 2014 in Savannah, Ga., with his longtime collaborators Lance Dixon of Stanford University’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and David Kosower of France’s Saclay Nuclear Research Centre. It is one of the most prestigious awards in physics.
Bern’s primary research interest is developing new methods for calculating and understanding scattering amplitudes. He is especially interested in applications to Large Hadron Collider physics and to maximally supersymmetric gauge and gravity theories.
He is receiving the award for “pathbreaking contributions to the calculation of perturbative scattering amplitudes, which led to a deeper understanding of quantum field theory and to powerful new tools for computing QCD (quantum chromodynamics) processes.”
Bern is a key player in a revolution that has swept through physicists’ understanding of particle collisions. Using novel methods, physicists can now describe more reliably how ordinary particles behave under the extreme conditions at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, aiding experimentalists in their search for exotic particles and forces.
Bern is overturning 30 years of accepted dogma on Einstein’s general relativity and quantum mechanics. The new methods breathe new life into the search for a unified theory based on an approach called supergravity.
Bern is UCLA’s second consecutive winner of this honor, which was presented in April to professor Roberto Peccei. The late professor Sakurai was a member of UCLA’s physics faculty.
For an overview of his research watch the video, TEDxCaltech: "Feynman Diagrams: Past, Present, Future." See also the cover story of the May 2012 issue of Scientific American.
