Synopsis
This volume gathers the contributions of founders, experts, and practitioners of supergravity celebrating the 50th anniversary of its birth, discussing the history of the field and its modern applications to high-energy physics, mathematics, particle physics, and cosmology. Since its discovery in the mid-1970s, fully understanding its symmetries and structures, the physical implications, permitted generalizations, and the connections with other theories have been highly nontrivial challenges. Whether supergravity will be proven true by experiments or will remain a mathematical framework, the theory is elegant, intriguing, rich, and entertaining. Many agree that it will continue to be an inspiration and theoretical laboratory for quantum gravity, as well as an intellectual achievement that expresses the highest levels of human creativity in our effort to understand the cosmos and its rules. Current and future practitioners, and historians of science, will value both the comprehensive history and future perspectives of the field within.
About the Authors
Anna Ceresole is a research director in theoretical physics of the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN), based at its Turin division. She earned her Ph.D. at SUNY Stony Brook and worked at Caltech before returning to Italy as an assistant professor at the Turin Polytechnic, while also collaborating with CERN over the years. Currently, she serves as an attachée at Italy's Permanent Delegation to UNESCO in Paris. With over 35 years dedicated to supergravity, she has contributed significantly to the structure and applications of N=2 theories in four and five dimensions, collaborating with many of the field's pioneers. She has been active within several European research networks and led INFN's national project on supergravity and strings until 2023. She is co-author of Tullio Regge: An Eclectic Genius (2019).
Gianguido Dall'Agata is a professor in theoretical physics at Padua University and director of the Galilean School of Higher Education in Padua. After his Ph.D. in Turin, he has worked at the von Humboldt University of Berlin, CERN and as visitor researcher at ENS and Ecole Polytechnique in Paris. Recipient of the 2008 SIGRAV prize, he has devoted most of his career to working on supergravity applications to string phenomenology, black hole physics and cosmology. He is author, with Marco Zagermann, of a book of lecture notes titled Supergravity: From First Principles to Modern Applications. He is also the founder of a recurrent international meeting on supergravity that has been held since 2015.
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