Michael Dine, professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has been awarded a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship. Dine plans to use the $32,000 fellowship to support his work during the 2006-07 academic year, when he will be on sabbatical leave.
Guggenheim Fellows are appointed on the basis of distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishments. The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation announced the winners of the 2006 fellowships in early April.
A theoretical physicist, Dine will spend part of his sabbatical at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara, where a workshop on string phenomenology that he is coorganizing will take place in the fall. The rest of the year he will spend at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
The focus of Dine's work during his sabbatical will be to prepare for interpreting new experimental results expected from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), an international facility now under construction in Geneva, Switzerland, which is scheduled to begin operation in 2007. The LHC will be the highest-energy instrument for particle physics research in the world, and physicists hope it will help them resolve many unanswered questions about the physics of elementary particles.
"There are good reasons to think that the LHC will produce major discoveries," Dine said.
Dine has made major contributions in the areas of supersymmetry, string theory, and other efforts to develop a "new physics" beyond the standard model of particle physics. The standard model is a very successful theory explaining the interactions of elementary particles, yet it is known to be incomplete. Ideas developed by Dine and others have led to predictions that will be tested for the first time in experiments conducted at the LHC. Dine is engaged in a number of projects exploring the experimental possibilities for the LHC.
