Nima Arkani-Hamed


Nima Arkani-Hamed is an Iranian-American-Canadian theoretical physicist, with interests in high-energy physics, quantum field theory, string theory, cosmology and collider physics. Arkani-Hamed is a member of the permanent faculty at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He is also director of The Center for Future High Energy Physics in Beijing, China.

Early life

Arkani-Hamed's parents, Jafargholi "Jafar" Arkani-Hamed and Hamideh Alasti are both physicists from Iran. His father, a native of Tabriz, had worked for the Apollo program in the early 1970s, was chairman of the physics department at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, and later taught earth and planetary sciences at McGill University in Montreal. Arkani-Hamed immigrated to Canada as a child with his family in the seventies.

Academic career

Arkani-Hamed graduated at the University of Toronto with a joint honours degree in mathematics and physics in 1993, and went to the University of California, Berkeley, for his graduate studies, where he worked under the supervision of Lawrence Hall. The majority of his graduate work was on studies of supersymmetry and flavor physics. His Ph.D. dissertation was titled "Supersymmetry and Hierarchies". He completed his Ph.D. in 1997 and went to SLAC at Stanford University for post-doctoral studies. During this time he worked with Savas Dimopoulos and developed the paradigm of large extra dimensions.
In 1999 he joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley physics department. He took a leave of absence from Berkeley to visit Harvard University beginning January 2001, and stayed at Harvard as a professor from 2002–2008. Since 2008 he has been a professor in the School of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

Honors and awards

In 2003 he won the Gribov Medal of the European Physical Society, and in the summer of 2005 while at Harvard he won the Phi Beta Kappa award for teaching excellence. In 2008, he won the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize given at Tel Aviv University to young scientists who have made outstanding and fundamental contributions in Physical Science. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009.. He gave the Messenger lectures at Cornell University in 2010, and is currently an
A. D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University.. In 2012 he was an inaugural awardee of the Fundamental Physics Prize, the creation of physicist and internet entrepreneur, Yuri Milner. He was one of six physicists featured in the award-winning 2013 documentary film
Particle Fever, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2017.

Selected works

  1. "" five lectures given at Cornell October 4–8, 2010 in the Messenger Lecture series.
  2. "" five lectures given at Cornell October 4–8, 2010, focus on n=4 supersymmetric Yang–Mills Theory.