April 17, 2006
UC Santa Cruz physicist Michael Dine awarded
Guggenheim Fellowship
By Tim Stephens
Michael Dine, professor of physics, 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.
Michael Dine will use his Guggenheim
fellowship to prepare for interpreting new experimental
results expected from the Large Hadron Collider now under
construction in Geneva.
Photo: Tim Stephens
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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, N.J.
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.