Physicist (1948)
In 2013 British physicist Peter Higgs was awarded the Nobel Prize of Physics for the discovery of the homonymous elementary particle. During the closing of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Higgs mentioned a 1976 research paper which proposed a scientific method for discovering the Higgs boson as having prompted scientists to avidly start searching for the existence of that particle. This paper was written by a team of three physicists. One of them was Dimitri Nanopoulos.
Nanopoulos is one of the world’s most cited scientists, an international authority in the field of high-energy physics, quantum mechanics and cosmology standing in the epicenter of the most modern advancements observed in physics. His research is regarded as having influenced modern physics to an extraordinary degree. He earned his degree in physics in the University of Athens before obtaining his doctorate in the University of Sussex. His first breakthrough contribution in physics was a research paper co-written with John Ellis and Mary Gaillard in 1976 entitled “The Phenomenological Profile of the Higgs Boson”. This paper marked the beginning of an intensive experimental search by the scientific community for what had been proposed by Peter Higgs as the Higgs boson.
In 1977 Nanopoulos and his team published a paper on the Grand Unified Theories, the prodrome of the string theory, while simultaneously proving the existence of 6 quarks. This groundbreaking research paper inaugurated a new era in the field of particle physics and cosmology while also laying down the foundations of a new field of physics called Astroparticle Physics. Nanopoulos has also published research on elementary particles such as leptons and the neutralino and on dark matter.
In 1979 he began working in CERN. Together with Sheldon Lee Glashow Nanopoulos calculated the production of the Higgs boson by means of an experimental method called gluon collision, which was the key method used in the discovery of the Higgs boson in the Large Hadron Collider of CERN. In the same year he began focusing on the string theory and by extension on supersymmetry.
Today, Nanopoulos has published over 675 research papers. In September 2004 he became the 4th most cited theoretical physicist of all time. He has served as professor in some of the most prestigious universities in America such as Stanford, Harvard and Texas A&M, as the national representative of Greece in CERN and other organizations of physics and space and was appointed as the 90th President of the Academy of Athens in 2015. He has been lauded multiple times, being twice the holder of the Gravity Research Foundation Award and as the recipient of the 2009 Enrico Fermi Prize for his contributions in the discovery of the fundamental properties of the Great Unification and the string theory.
Nanopoulos aims to unveil the secrets of the creation of the Universe, the existence of parallel worlds and to find the basic equation of creation of the Multiverse. His life’s goal is to discover the Grand Unified Theory, the dream of every theoretical physicist and to provide answers to man’s greatest question.
Bibliography:
- Νανόπουλος, Δημήτρης (2015). Στὸν Τρίτο Βράχο ἀπὸ τὸν Ἥλιο. Ἐκδόσεις Πατάκη. Ἀθήνα. 2α Ἔκδοσις.
