Pran Nath - Research

Research

His main area of research is in the fields of supergravity and particle physics beyond the standard model. He is one of the originators of the first supergravity theory in 1975. In 1982 in collaboration with Richard Arnowitt and Ali Hani Chamseddine, he developed the field of Applied Supergravity and the supergravity grand unification popularly known as SUGRA or mSUGRA model for gravity mediated breaking of supersymmetry. SUGRA models, and specifically mSUGRA, are currently the leading candidates for discovery at the Fermilab Tevatron and at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). He has contributed to further development of the field through studies of CP violation, predictions on muon anomalous moment gμ − 2 ahead of experiment, supersymmetric dark matter, discovery of the hyperbolic branch of radiative breaking of the electroweak symmetry, and detection of supersymmetric signal at colliders via the so called tri-leptonic signal. He has also made contribution to studies on stability of the proton in unified models. His early work concerns the invention of effective Lagrangian method, the first current algebra analysis of pion-pion scattering and solution to the notorious U(1) problem. His recent work has focused SO(10) grand unification, and on the Stueckelberg extensions of the Standard Model. In 1999 he was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Prize for ”basic contributions in supersymmetry and supergravity”.