Name Marc Henneaux | Role Physicist | |
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Education Universite libre de Bruxelles Books Quantization of Gauge Systems, Classical Foundations of BRST Symmetry | ||
Public Lecture of Prof. Marc HENNEAUX at MG15 - Rome, July 2018
Marc Henneaux is a Belgian theoretical physicist and professor at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) who was born in Brussels on March 5, 1955.
Contents
- Public Lecture of Prof Marc HENNEAUX at MG15 Rome July 2018
- Main Prizes and awards
- Other distinctions
- References
Henneaux studied physics at ULB and received his doctoral degree in 1980 under the supervision of Jules Géhéniau. He was a Visiting Fellow at Princeton University for the academic year 1978-1979 where a long-term collaboration with Claudio Bunster was initiated. He was then postdoctoral research associate and lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin from 1981 to 1984, to continue working with Claudio Bunster. From there, he held a research position at the Belgian Science foundation (FNRS) until 1992, after which he was appointed Associate Professor at the University of Brussels (1993-1996).
He is currently Full Professor at the University of Brussels since October 1996. He also serves as Director of the International Solvay Institutes for Physics and Chemistry, founded by Ernest Solvay since January 2004.
The research of Henneaux is devoted to the study of the theoretical models describing the fundamental physical interactions (electromagnetism, weak and strong nuclear forces, gravity), with a particular emphasis on their symmetries. With J.David Brown, he showed that Einstein theory of gravity in three spacetime dimensions with a negative cosmological constant possesses a remarkable symmetry structure at infinity described by two Virasoro algebras. The corresponding central charge bears the name of « Brown-Henneaux central charge ». This work is sometimes regarded as one of the precursors of the celebrated AdS/CFT correspondence. Henneaux also studied the geometrical and algebraic aspects of theories with a gauge freedom, and in particular on the so-called Becchi-Rouet-Stora-Tyutin symmetry and its cohomology. More recently, in collaboration with Thibault Damour, he showed that hyperbolic Coxeter groups appear somewhat unexpectedly in gravitational theories and their supersymmetric extensions, in the BKL behaviour of the fields near a spacelike singularity.