Paul Frampton

Paul Frampton

UNC Faculty image of Paul Frampton uploaded in 2006
Born (1943-10-31) 31 October 1943
Kidderminster, England
Fields particle phenomenology
Institutions UNC-Chapel Hill
Alma mater Brasenose College, Oxford
Doctoral advisor John C. Taylor
Known for Model building

Paul Howard Frampton (born 31 October 1943) is a British particle phenomenologist. From 1996 until 2014, he was the Louis D. Rubin, Jr. Distinguished Professor of physics and astronomy, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Born in Kidderminster, England, he attended King Charles I School, 1954–62, then Brasenose College, Oxford, 1962–68. He received BA (Double First) in 1965, MA, DPhil in 1968, and DSc in 1984, degrees all from Oxford. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1990) and the American Physical Society (1981). In 1987 he was the project director for siting the Superconducting Supercollider, in North Carolina. A Festschrift for his 60th birthday has been published.[1]

In 2012, Frampton was caught up in a drug mule scam leading to a drug smuggling conviction in Argentina based on what he says were jokes taken out of context.

Research

His DPhil thesis analyzed the relationship between current algebra and superconvergence sum rules, and contained a 1967 sum rule. In 1970, he analyzed the absence of ghosts in the dual resonance model.

Three examples of his model building are the chiral color model, in 1987, which predicts axigluons; the 331 model, in 1992, which can explain the number of quark-lepton generations, and predicts bileptons; his proposal, in 1995, of the binary tetrahedral group as a flavor symmetry. All three serve as targets of opportunity for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In 2002, he built a model relating matter–antimatter asymmetry in the early universe to measurements possible on Earth. In 2015, he showed that the 331-model predicts long-lived quarks accessible to Run 2 of the LHC.

In formal directions, three examples are that he calculated, in 1976, the rate of vacuum decay in quantum field theory; in 1982, he analyzed ten-dimensional gauge field theory, and its hexagon anomaly, precursor to the first superstring revolution; in 1988, he constructed the Lagrangian which describes the dynamics of the p-adic string.

For cosmology, two examples are, in 2007, he built a cyclic model which can solve a 75-year-old entropy problem; in 2010, he discussed how dark energy may be better understood by studying temperature and entropy. In 2015, he demonstrated how cyclic entropy can lead to flat geometry without an inflationary era and estimated the time until contraction to be close to one hundred times the present age of the universe.

Drug smuggling conviction

In November 2012, Frampton was convicted of drug smuggling in Argentina and sentenced to 4 years, 8 months.[2] He said he was a victim of a scam after meeting an impostor of an internationally known model on a dating website, and that he had been tricked by gangsters into transporting two kilos of cocaine hidden in the liner fabric of a suitcase.[3] The prosecutor presented evidence of text messages and emails sent by Frampton discussing the suitcase, the drugs, and their street value.[4][5] Frampton said that some of the texts and emails were jokes and were presented by prosecutors out of context.[5]

He was fired from his UNC post in 2014. On June 16, 2015 an appeals court in North Carolina unanimously ruled that his university violated its own policies by placing Frampton on unpaid leave while he awaited trial, and ordered the university to restore Frampton's back salary and benefits.[6] Frampton's own account of these events was published in 2014.[7]

Publications

Frampton's first publication was Chirality Commutator and Vector Mesons, in 1967. He has published numerous articles on particle phenomenology. He was the author of a book[8] on string theory, in 1974 (2nd edition1986), when it was still named the dual resonance model. In 1986, he published a book[9] on quantum field theory (2nd edition 2000, 3rd edition 2008). A book[10] on cyclic cosmology, for the general public, was published in 2009. He has published over 500 scientific articles.

References

  1. ↑ Curtright, T.; Mintz, S.; Perlmutter, A. (2004). "La Belle Epoque of High Energy Physics and Cosmology". World Scientific Publishing Company.
  2. ↑ Banks, Michael (22 Nov 2012). "Paul Frampton hit by 56-month drugs sentence". Physics World. Institute of Physics. Retrieved 2013-04-02.
  3. ↑ Swann, Maxine (March 8, 2013). "The Professor, the Bikini Model and the Suitcase Full of Trouble". New York Times. Retrieved 18 March 2013.
  4. ↑ Price, Jay (May 23, 2014). "UNC-CH fires physics professor jailed in Argentina". Raleigh News & Observer. Archived from the original on May 25, 2014. Retrieved 24 March 2014.
  5. 1 2 "UNC Physics Professor is Convicted of Drug Smuggling in Argentina" (PDF). APS News 22 (1): 5. January 2013. Retrieved 2016-01-31.
  6. ↑ Blythe, Anne (June 16, 2015). "UNC Physics Professor jailed in Argentina wins back pay". Raleigh News & Observer. Retrieved 25 June 2015.
  7. ↑ Frampton, Paul (2014). Tricked!: The story of an internet scam. ASIN B00RBVDAD0.
  8. ↑ Frampton, P.H. (1974). Dual Resonance Models. Frontiers in Physics, W. A. Benjamin. ISBN 978-0-8053-2581-2.
  9. ↑ Frampton, P.H. (1986). Gauge field theories. Frontiers in Physics, Addison-Wesley. ISBN 978-0-471-34783-5.
  10. ↑ Frampton, P.H. (2009). Did Time Begin? Will Time End?: Maybe the Big Bang never occurred. World Scientific Publishing Company. ISBN 978-981-4280-58-7.

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Monday, February 15, 2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.