Howard Georgi

Howard Mason Georgi III, born January 6, 1947 in San Bernardino, California, is Harvard College Professor and Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics at Harvard University. He is best known for early work in Grand Unification and gauge coupling unification within SU(5) and SO(10) groups (see Georgi-Glashow model).

Georgi has for many years taught an advanced freshman physics course, "Physics 16" in the fall semester. He is also Director of Undergraduate Studies in Physics and has been Co-Master of Leverett House with his wife, Ann Blake Georgi, since 1998. He graduated from Harvard College in 1967 and obtained his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1971. He was Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows from 1973-1976 and a Senior Fellow from 1982-1998. In 1995 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and received the Sakurai Prize; in 2000 he shared the Dirac Medal with Jogesh Pati and Helen Quinn. He has advised a number of notable students, including Andrew G. Cohen, Adam Falk, Benjamin Grinstein, John Hagelin, Lawrence J. Hall, David B. Kaplan, Michael Luke, Aneesh Manohar, Ann Nelson, Brian Greene, Sally Dawson and Lisa Randall.

Georgi proposed an SU(5) GUT model with softly broken supersymmetry with Savas Dimopoulos in 1981. This paper is one of the foundational works for the supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM). After the measurements of the three Standard Model gauge couplings at LEP I in 1991, it was shown that particle content of the MSSM, in contrast to the Standard Model alone, led to precision gauge coupling unification.

He has since worked on several different areas of physics including composite Higgs models, heavy quark effective theory, dimensional deconstruction, little Higgs, and unparticle theories.

Unparticle physics is a theory that there exists matter that cannot be explained in terms of particles, because its components are scale invariant. Howard Georgi proposed this theory in the spring of 2007 in the papers "Unparticle Physics" and "Another Odd Thing About Unparticle Physics".

Together with Vadim Alexeevich Kuzmin, Georgi received the Pomeranchuk Prize of the Alikhanov Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP) in 2006.

Georgi has published several books, the best known of which is Lie Algebras in Particle Physics published by World Scientific. He has also published The Physics of Waves and Weak Interactions and Modern Particle Theory.