Richard Arnowitt

Who is Richard Arnowitt?

Richard Lewis Arnowitt is an American physicist known for his contributions to theoretical particle physics and to general relativity.

Arnowitt is a Distinguished Professor at Texas A&M University, where he is a member of the Department of Physics.

His current research interests are centered on supersymmetry and supergravity, from phenomenology to more theoretical questions of string and M theory.

In the context of general relativity, he is best known for his development of the ADM formalism, roughly speaking a way of describing spacetime as space evolving in time, which allows a recasting of Einstein's theory in terms of a more general formalism used in physics to describe dynamical systems, namely the Hamiltonian formalism. In the framework of that formalism, there is also a straightforward way to globally define quantities like energy or, equivalently, mass which, in general relativity, is not trivial at all.

Arnowitt is also known for his work which developed the theory of supergravity grand unification. This work allowed for the unification of the three forces of microscopic physics at a very high mass scale. The simplest version, called mSUGRA, is now commonly used to search for new physics at high energy accelerators. In addition, Arnowitt's work on many body theory of liquid Helium has stimulated many applications in that field.