Frank A. Wilczek
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Primary Section: 13, Physics Membership Type:
Member
(elected 1990)
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Research Interests
I find all sorts of things interesting. My professional work has touched on a large variety of questions in theoretical physics. Abiding interests include: "pure" particle physics, especially connections between ambitious theoretical ideas and concrete observable phenomena (e.g., applications of asymptotic freedom, unification of couplings); the behavior of matter at ultra-high temperature ( e.g. phase structure of high temperature QCD, possibility of disordered chiral condensate); the application of insights from particle physics to cosmology (e.g., axions as dark matter candidates, search techniques for these and for WIMPs); the application of field theory techniques to condensed matter physics (e.g., exotic quantum numbers on solitons of various sorts, statistical transmutation and fractional statistics in the quantum Hall effect); and the quantum theory of black holes (e.g., existence of quantum hair, classical hair and entropy of string-theoretic holes). I have strong recreational interests in chess, music, and logic puzzles. I have long admired developments in computing and in molecular biology from a distance. Sometimes I fantasize about getting seriously involved, in a future life.
