Howard Georgi

Biosketch

Howard Georgi is Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics at Harvard. He is a theoretical particle physicist best known for early work in QCD, the SU(5) and SO(10) grand unified theories, development of the QCD-motivated quark model and the prediction of charmed particle masses and properties, the chiral quark model, softly broken supersymmetry and the supersymmetric standard model, the heavy quark effective theory, composite Higgs bosons, and unparticle physics. He was born in San Bernardino, CA, educated at Harvard (BA 1967) and Yale (PhD 1971) and spent the rest of his professional career at Harvard. He was a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows before joining the faculty in 1976. He was very fortunate to have many wonderful graduate students, three of whom (so far) have been elected to the NAS. From 1998 to 2018 he was Faculty Dean of Leverett House, one of the 12 Harvard Undergraduate Houses.

Research Interests

A theoretical physicist interested in elementary particles, I have been involved in many aspects of our current standard model of particle physics. One particular long-standing interest concerns applications of QCD, the theory that describes the strong interactions that bind quarks into protons, neutrons, and other hadrons. Another is in Grand Unification, the still speculative idea that the matter particles and forces we see with contemporary accelerators may be unified at much higher energies and shorter distances. A third is the flavor puzzle -- What is the significance of the masses and mixing angles between different quark flavors? In recent years, while continuing with research on QCD, I have been primarily concerned with the issue of what breaks the symmetry of electroweak interactions, and what, therefore, the longitudinal spin components of the W and Z bosons are made of.