Paul Frampton

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Paul H. Frampton (born October 31, 1943 in England) is a theoretical physicist working in America. A student 1954-62 at the only school chartered by Charles I of England, he was conferred BA (1965, double first), MA DPhil (1968) and DSc (1984) degrees by Oxford University where he was Hulme Open Scholar 1962-65 then Senior Hulme Scholar 1965-68 of Brasenose College. Since 1996 he is Rubin Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he was recognized for contributions to model building.

In model building (particle physics), his papers include the chiral color model (1987, with Sheldon Glashow) and the 331 model (1992). Chiral color predicts an octet of spin-one electrically neutral axigluons coupled to quarks. The 331 model predicts a spin-one doubly-charged bilepton coupling to two electrons. Both the axigluon and the bilepton have current lower mass bounds from experiment of about 1 TeV.

In 1987 he was appointed by James G. Martin, the Governor of North Carolina, as Project Director to propose a site for the Superconducting Super Collider to the United States Department of Energy. The site had exceptionally good geology, the principal selection criterion, and made the first cut only to be defeated politically by a site in Waxahachie, Texas; the SSC was cancelled in 1993 by the United States Congress after building 14 miles of tunnel and spending 2 billion dollars.

He organized a series of Workshops on Grand Unification held every April for the ten years starting in 1980. The series was suspended in 1989 with the intention to reconvene for further Workshops only after experiment detects proton decay.