The German Center for Research and Innovation and
the German Research Foundation
cordially invite you to a panel discussion on:
The Origins of Mass, Matter, and the Early Universe
Thursday, March 20, 2014 from 6:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
with
Dr. Jonathan R. Ellis
Clerk Maxwell Professor of Theoretical Physics, Kings College
Member of the Theory Division, European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)
and
Dr. Paul J. Steinhardt
Albert Einstein Professor in Science, Director of the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science
Princeton University
moderated by
Dr. Dieter Lüst
Chair for Mathematical Physics, Director, Arnold Sommerfeld Center for Theoretical Physics
Ludwig-Maximillians Universität
German House, 871 United Nations Plaza (First Ave. at 49th Street), New York, NY
RSVP by March 18 by clicking here.
Registration is required to attend. Seating is limited.
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Speaker Biographies:
Jonathan R. Ellis, CBE, FRS is Clerk Maxwell Professor of Theoretical Physics at
King’s College in London and a member of the Theory Division of CERN,
Geneva. Dr. Ellis joined the European Organization for Nuclear Research
(CERN) in 1978 where he played an influential role in the 1984 workshop on
physics, which was instrumental in the creation of the Large Hadron Collider
(LHC). Dr. Ellis has written many articles on searches for Higgs bosons and
supersymmetric particles at the LHC, both for the particle physics community
and on a more popular level. His most recent LHC physics review appeared in
a Nature Insight supplement on July 19, 2007. Dr. Ellis’ research interests
focus on the phenomenological aspects of particle physics, though he has also
made important contributions to astrophysics, cosmology, and quantum gravity.
He was one of the pioneers of research at the interface between particle physics and cosmology, which
has since become a sub-specialty of its own: particle astrophysics. In the 1980s, Dr. Ellis became a
leading advocate for models of supersymmetry. In one of his earliest works, he showed that the lightest
supersymmetric particle is a natural dark matter candidate. In 1991, he demonstrated that radioactive
corrections to the mass of the lightest Higgs boson in minimal supersymmetric models increased that mass
beyond the reach of the Large Electron–Positron Collider (LEP) searches. More generally, Dr. Ellis and
collaborators have pioneered the analysis of so-called, “benchmark scenarios” which are intended to
illustrate the range of phenomenology expected from supersymmetric models.
Paul J. Steinhardt is Albert Einstein Professor in Science and Director of the
Princeton Center for Theoretical Science at Princeton University, where he is
also on the faculty of both the Department of Physics and the Department of
Astrophysical Sciences. He received his B.S. in Physics at Caltech in 1974,
his M.A. in Physics in 1975, and his Ph.D. in Physics in 1978 at Harvard
University. He was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows from
1978 to 1981 and on the faculty of the Department of Physics and
Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania from 1981 to 1998, where he
was Mary Amanda Wood Professor from 1989 to 1998. He is a Fellow in
the American Physical Society and a member of the National Academy of
Sciences. He shared the P.A.M. Dirac Medal from the International Centre
for Theoretical Physics in 2002 for his contribution to the development of the inflationary model of the
universe; the Oliver E. Buckley Prize of the American Physical Society in 2010 for his contribution to the
theory of quasicrystals; and the John Scott Award in 2012 for his contributions to both fields. In 2012, he
was named Simons Fellow in Theoretical Physics, Radcliffe Institute Fellow at Harvard, and Moore Fellow
at Caltech. He is the author of over 200 refereed articles, six patents, two patents pending, three
technical books, and numerous popular articles. In 2007, he co-authored “Endless Universe: The Big
Bang and Beyond”, a popular book on contemporary theories of cosmology. He is one of the codiscoverers of the first natural quasicrystal and, in 2011, led a geological expedition to Chukotka in Far
Eastern Russia to find new information about its origin and search for more samples.
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Moderator Biography:
Dieter Lüst is Chair for Mathematical Physics at the Ludwig-Maximilians
Universität (LMU) in Munich and Director of the Arnold Sommerfeld Center
for Theoretical Physics at LMU, as well as Director of the Max Planck Institute
for Physics in Munich. In 1986, Dr. Lüst was among the first to construct string
theories in four dimensions, showing that string theory allows for an incredibly
huge number of solutions, when proceeding from ten to four space-time
dimensions. This discovery was crucial for the so-called landscape discussion
in string theory, which started about ten years ago. In 1990, he was among
the first to discuss strong-weak-coupling duality (S-duality) in string theory,
which about five years later was a key element in the formulation of M-theory
as a unifying description of all known forces in nature. From 1988 to 2004,
Dr. Lüst was Professor of Theoretical Physics at the Humboldt University in
Berlin and worked in the theory division at CERN. In 2000, he was among the inventors of intersecting Dbrane models, which describe realistic string models in four dimensions. For his achievements, Dr. Lüst was
awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize by the DFG in 2000. In 2006, he received the HumboldtGay-Lussac Prize from the Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation together with the French Minister of
Science. Since 2012, Dr. Lüst has held an Advanced Grant by the European Research Council (ERC).
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