more than double the monetary award that goes with a Nobel prize.
The award is a brand new one just created this year and Arkani-Hamed is one of the first nine physicists from around the world to win it. Each takes home $3 million.
They are the recipients of the Fundamental Physics Prize, created by Yuri Milner, a Russian who dropped out of graduate school in 1989 and later earned billions investing in Internet firms like Facebook and Groupon.
The New York Times said the $3 million award is “the most lucrative academic prize in the world.”
Milner said he created the prize to recognize advances in delving into the deepest mysteries of physics and the universe. “The intellectual quest to understand the universe really defines us as human beings,” he said. Milner, who lives in Russia, also said he was motivated by concern that the income of top scientists is poor when one sees what athletes and movie stars are paid.
Four of this year’s winners, including Arkani-Hamed, work at the Institute for Advanced Study, which is located in Princeton, New Jersey, but separate from the university. It was founded in 1930 and was the workplace for Albert Einstein after he fled Germany.
The four winners from there work on theories trying to tie together the basic principles and forces of the universe, particularly with a mathematical concept known as string theory.
Of the other five winners, three are at universities in the United States, one in Paris and one in India.
Milner personally selected the first nine winners but future winners will be selected by previous winners.
Unlike the Nobel Prize in physics, the Fundamental Physics Prize can be awarded to scientists whose ideas have not yet been verified by experiments, which often occurs decades later. Sometimes a radical new idea “really deserves recognition right away because it expands our understanding of at least what is possible,” Milner said.
Arkani-Hamed, for example, has worked on theories about the origin of the Higgs boson, the particle thought to have been discovered recently at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, and about how that collider could discover new dimensions. None of his theories have been proved yet. He said several were “under strain” because of the new data.
Several of the winners said they hoped that the new prize, with its large cash award, would help raise recognition of physics and draw more students into the field. “It’ll be great to have this sort of showcase for what’s going on in the subject every year,” Arkani-Hamed said.
Born in Houston, Arkani-Hamed, 40, got his undergraduate degree from the University of Toronto and his doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley. He worked at Berkeley and at Harvard before joining the Institute for Advanced Study in 2008.
Arkani-Hamed is concerned with the relation between theory and experiment. His research has shown how the extreme weakness of gravity, relative to other forces of nature, might be explained by the existence of extra dimensions of space, and how the structure of comparatively low-energy physics is constrained within the context of string theory. He has taken a lead in proposing new physical theories that can be tested at the Large Hadron Collider.