David Olive

Template:Short description Template:EngvarB Template:Use dmy dates David Ian Olive Template:Post-nominals (Template:IPAc-en (Template:ErrorTemplate:Category handler)Template:Category handler; 16 April 1937 – 7 November 2012) was a British theoretical physicist. Olive made fundamental contributions to string theory and duality theory, he is particularly known for his work on the GSO projection and Montonen–Olive duality.

He was professor of physics at Imperial College, London, from 1984 to 1992.Template:Sfn In 1992 he moved to Swansea University to help set up the new theoretical physics group.Template:Sfn

He was awarded the Dirac Prize and Medal of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in 1997.Template:Sfn He was a Founding Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.Template:Sfn He was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society in 1987, and appointed CBE in 2002.Template:Sfn

Biography

Early life and education

David Olive was born in Middlesex in 1937Template:Sfn and educated at the Royal High School, Edinburgh and Edinburgh University. He then moved to St John's College, Cambridge, obtaining his PhD under the supervision of John Taylor in 1963.Template:Sfn

He married Jenny in 1963; they had 2 daughters and a granddaughter.

Career

After a short postdoctoral appointment at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, Olive returned to Cambridge as a Fellow of Churchill College, becoming a Lecturer in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) in 1965. Here he made key contributions to the approach to particle physics known as S-matrix theory. His 1966 book [[#Template:Harvid|The Analytic S-matrix]] co-authored with Richard Eden, Peter Landshoff and John Polkinghorne, remains a definitive text on the subject and is known as [[#Template:Harvid|ELOP]].Template:Sfn

In 1971, Olive made what he has described as a "momentous personal decision" to sacrifice his tenured position in Cambridge and move to the Theory Division, CERN as a fixed-term staff member. He was part of a team assembled by Daniele Amati to work on the theory originally known as the dual resonance model but shortly to be recognised as string theory. In CERN, Olive began the collaborations with the circle of string theorists many of whom feature in his memoir [[#Template:Harvid|From Dual Fermion to Superstring]]. His work at CERN, in part in collaboration with Lars Brink and Ed Corrigan, initially focused on the consistent formulation of dual fermion amplitudes, generalising the existing bosonic models. This period saw several of Olive's major contributions to string theory, including the Gliozzi-Scherk-Olive (GSO) projection which elucidated the role of spacetime supersymmetry in ensuring consistency of the dual fermion model and was to prove an essential step in establishing 10-dimensional superstring theory. He was one of the first to become convinced of the conceptual revolution whereby string theory is viewed as a unified theory of all particle interactions, including gravity, rather than simply as a model of hadrons. This was the subject of his plenary talk at the 1974 Rochester conference in London.Template:Sfn

In 1977, Olive returned to the UK to take up a lectureship at Imperial College, becoming Professor in 1984 and Head of the Theoretical Physics Group in 1988. He had by now begun collaboration with Peter Goddard and together they produced a series of papers on the mathematical foundations of string theory, notably on Virasoro and Kac-Moody algebras and their representations and relation to vertex operators. One outcome of their work on algebras and lattices was the identification of the special role played by the two Lie groups SO(32) and E8 x E8, which would shortly be shown by Michael Green and John Schwarz to exhibit anomaly cancellation that led to the renaissance of string theory in 1984.Template:Sfn

This body of work from 1973 to 1983 was recognised with the award of the prestigious Dirac Medal in 1997 to Goddard and Olive "in recognition of their far-sighted and highly influential contributions to theoretical physics. They have contributed many crucial insights that shaped our emerging understanding of string theory and have also had a far-reaching impact on our understanding of 4-dimensional field theory.” The Dirac Medal also recognised a second major line of research pioneered by Olive, on duality symmetries in gauge field theories, this work was to play a key role in later developments of M-theory. While still at CERN, Olive had begun to study the magnetic monopoles which 't Hooft and Polyakov had shown existed in non-abelian gauge theories, publishing a paper with Peter Goddard and Jean Nuyts.Template:Sfn In 1977, together with Claus Montonen, he made the remarkable conjecture that there should exist an electromagnetic dual theory in which the roles of monopoles and gauge bosons are interchanged. In subsequent work with Ed Witten, Olive showed that this duality is realised in a certain class of supersymmetric theories.Template:Sfn This Montonen-Olive duality was later found to emerge from a deeper web of dualities underlying M-theory, ushering in the second superstring revolution of the mid 1990s.Template:Sfn

In 1992, Olive left Imperial to take up a research professorship in mathematics and physics at Swansea University, where together with Ian Halliday he built the theoretical particle physics group. He continued to work on mathematical physics, exploring the deep symmetries underlying quantum field theories, especially affine Toda theory. His retirement was marked by a conference "Strings, Gauge Fields and Duality" held in his honour in Swansea in 2004.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn He presented the Dirac Lecture at DAMTP on 14 June 2004 titled The Eternal Magnetic Monopole.

See also

• GSO projection
• Montonen–Olive duality
• M-theory
• Supersymmetry
• String theory

External links

• Template:Link note
• Scientific publications of David Olive on INSPIRE-HEP