String theory gets European award

An ambitious project is underway to discover the elusive unified theory of everything by examining the universe’s stringy birth.

The universe is a mysterious place. Could string theory provide a unified theory of everything?

String theory once seemed the most promising path to discovering a theory of everything - yet 40 years later that goal remains elusive. Now a project led by one of the world’s experts in string theory - Dr. Martin Schnabl - could make major progress towards a unified theory and revitalise the field.

His group is working on two significant mysteries - how the universe materialised as a random fluctuation of a vacuum state, and a common explanation for all sub-atomic particles. An essential step towards a unified theory is explaining how quantum mechanics is compatible with general relativity.

“It is important in the regimes where quantum gravity is important, such as black holes and the beginning of the universe,” said Dr Schnabl. In such situations, energies and masses are huge and confined in small dimensions creating gravitation fields of a magnitude that can only be dealt with by general relativity.

String theory replaces the idea of elementary particles occupying a single zero point with a one-dimensional string. As the number of particles that we can create in an accelerator grows, the string is an attempt to describe them all with one concept.

To help him pursue a unified theory, Dr Schnabl will receive a European Young Investigator Award (EURYI) from the European Science Foundation and the European Heads of Research Councils. The EURYI Awards scheme was designed five years ago to attract outstanding young researches from around the world to create their own research teams at European research centres. Those within the field have praised Dr Schnabl’s solution for its elegance and beauty in bringing together important concepts in mathematics and physics. Most awards are between €1,000,000 and €1,250,000, comparable in size to the Nobel Prize.

Dr. Schnabl is a 34 year-old Czech scientist who did his PhD in theoretical physics at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy. He then went on to become a research associate at MIT and a CERN fellow. Now he will continue his research at the Institute of Physics Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic with 19 other young researchers.

Leila Sattary