String theorists snare Breakthrough Prize

摘要

The 2017 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics has been awarded to Joseph Polchinski, University of California at Santa Barbara, and Andrew Strominger and Cumrun Vafa of Harvard University. The three winners, who received the $3 million award at a glitzy ceremony in San Francisco on 4 December, have made important contributions to fundamental physics including quantum gravity and string theory. Polchinski was recognised in particular for his discovery of D-branes, while the citation for Strominger and Vafa included their derivation of the Bekenstein-Hawking area-entropy relation, which unified the laws of thermodynamics and black-hole dynamics.