Rate My Professor Nima Arkani-Hamed

Nima Arkani-Hamed is the Gopal Prasad Professor in Particle Physics within the School of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study. He earned a B.Sc. in Mathematics and Physics from the University of Toronto in 1993 and a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1997. Following his graduate studies, he served as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory from 1997 to 1999. Arkani-Hamed then joined the University of California, Berkeley as Assistant Professor of Physics from 1999 to 2001, advancing to Associate Professor from 2001 to 2002. He subsequently held the position of Professor of Physics at Harvard University from 2002 to 2007, including a year as Visiting Professor prior to his full appointment. In 2008, he became Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, where he continues his research as a permanent faculty member.

One of the leading particle physics phenomenologists of his generation, Nima Arkani-Hamed focuses on the intricate relation between theory and experiment, particularly through current and future particle accelerators and cosmological observations. His wide-ranging interests in fundamental physics include extra dimensions to explain the weakness of gravity, the hierarchy problem, the cosmological constant problem, string theory landscapes, and groundbreaking developments such as the amplituhedron and scattering amplitudes via the positive Grassmannian. Notable contributions encompass proposing large extra dimensions with S. Dimopoulos and G. Dvali, dynamically generated extra dimensions with A. G. Cohen and H. Georgi, supersymmetric unification without low-energy supersymmetry signatures for the LHC, and a theory of dark matter. Key publications feature "The Hierarchy Problem and New Dimensions at a Millimeter" (Phys. Lett. B 429, 263, 1998), "New Dimensions at a Millimeter to a Fermi and Superstrings at a TeV" (Phys. Lett. B 436, 263, 1998), "Electroweak Symmetry Breaking from Dimensional Deconstruction" (Phys. Lett. B 513, 232, 2001), "A Theory of Dark Matter" (Phys. Rev. D 79, 015014, 2009), "The Amplituhedron" (JHEP 1401:030, 2014), and "Physics Opportunities of a 100 TeV Proton-Proton Collider" (hep-th/1511.06595, 2015). Arkani-Hamed has received the Fundamental Physics Prize (2012), Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize in Physics (2008), Gribov Medal from the European Physical Society (2003), Packard Fellowship (2000-2005), and Sloan Fellowship (2000-2002). He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Additionally, he has delivered prominent public lectures, including the Messenger Lectures at Cornell University in 2010 and "The Inevitability of Physical Laws: Why the Higgs Has to Exist" at the Institute for Advanced Study in 2012.