Ann Nelson

Ann Elizabeth Nelson (born 1958) is a particle physicist at the University of Washington. She was a student of Howard Georgi and has been a member of the university's Particle Theory Group since 1994. She and her collaborators are known for a number of theories, including the theory of spontaneous violation of CP (charge conjugation and parity symmetry), which may explain the origin of the asymmetry observed between matter and anti-matter; the theory of Bose-Einstein condensation of kaon mesons in dense matter, which predicts strangeness in neutron stars; the basic mechanism for electroweak baryogenesis which may explain the origin of matter in the universe; the theory of gauge mediated supersymmetry breaking to account for how supersymmetry at short distances might be compatible with the absence of observed flavor symmetry violation at long distances; the Little Higgs theory which may explain why the Higgs boson must be relatively light; and the theory of "accelerons" which relates neutrino masses to the cosmological dark energy responsible for the relatively recent acceleration of the expansion of the universe. Ann Nelson received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011 and the National Academy of Sciences in 2012.