Miguel Ángel Virasoro (physicist)

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Miguel Ángel Virasoro (Spanish: [miˈɣel ˈaŋxel viɾaˈsoɾo]; Buenos Aires, 9 May 1940 – Buenos Aires, 23 July 2021)^[1][2] was an Argentine theoretical physicist who worked in Argentina, Israel, the United States, France, and Italy but spent most of his professional career in Italy.^[1] He shared a name with his father, the Argentine philosopher Miguel Ángel Virasoro.^[3] Virasoro was known for his work in string theory and the study of spin glasses. The Virasoro-Shapiro amplitude,^[4] the Virasoro algebra,^[5] the Virasoro vertex operator algebra, Virasoro group and the Virasoro minimal model are named after him.

Biography[]

Early life and Argentina[]

Miguel Ángel Virasoro was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in on May 9, 1940.^[2] He shared a name with his father, a noted Argentinian philosopher who founded dialectical existentialism.^[3] The younger Virasoro studied physics at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) from 1958 to 1966. He received his bachelor's degree in 1962 and his PhD in 1966.^[6]

Israel and the United States[]

In 1966, Virasoro left Argentina after La Noche de los Bastones Largos, a violent dislodging of students and teachers from UBA who opposed the military government of Argentinian General Juan Carlos Onganía.^[1] The military dictatorship of Onganía would last from 1966 to 1970. After leaving Argentina, Virasoro worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel in 1967 and 1968. He then worked at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-M) in the United States in 1968 and 1969.^[7] After his time at UW-M, Virsasoro spent another year as a postdoc in the United States at the University of California, Berkeley.

Return to Argentina[]

Virasoro returned to Argentina after the end of Juan Carlos Onganía's dictatorship. In 1971, he accepted a professorship at his alma mater UBA.^[7] Virasoro remained at UBA until 1975, at which time he accepted a year-long position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.^[8] In 1976, General Jorge Rafael Videla came to power in Argentina and established another military dictatorship. As a result, Virasoro was unable to return to his home country after his year in the United States and instead moved to Europe.^[3]

France and Italy[]

In Europe, Virasoro took a temporary position at the École normale supérieure in Paris, France in 1976. Virasoro then moved to Italy in 1977 where he worked as a professor at the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare at the University of Turin from 1977 until 1981. He then moved to La Sapienza University of Rome, where he remained for thirty years until his Italian retirement and return to Argentina in 2011.^[3][9] At La Sapienza, Virasoro performed research in mathematical physics, string theory, and statistical mechanics and taught courses on electromagnetism and on physical-mathematical models for economics.^[10] He was also a director of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy from 1995 until 2002.^[10]

Later years and death[]

In his later years, Virasoro received several awards, honors, and appointments. In 1987, he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.^[11] In 1998, he was elected as an international honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.^[12] In 2009, he was awarded the Enrico Fermi Prize of the Italian Physical Society, which he shared with Greek physicist Dimitri Nanopoulos, for "the discovery of an infinite-dimensional algebra of primary importance for the construction of string theories."^[13] In 2020, he was awarded the Dirac Medal of the ICTP, which he shared with French physicists André Neveu and Pierre Ramond, "for their pioneering contributions to the inception and formulation of string theory which introduced new bosonic and fermionic symmetries into physics."^[14]

From 2011 until his death, Virasoro was an honorary professor at the Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento in his home country of Argentina.^[2][10] Virasoro died on July 23, 2021 at the age of 81.^[1]

Research[]

String theory[]

Much of Virasoro's early work was in a branch of theoretical particle physics which would later be understood as string theory. In fact, much of Virasoro's work helped found the field of string theory. During Virasoro's time in Israel, his colleague Gabriele Veneziano discovered a formula (the Veneziano amplitude) which described the scattering of open strings.^[15] Then during his time at University of Wisconsin-Madison, Virasoro successfully generalized Veneziano's theory and discovered a formula (the Virasoro-Shapiro amplitude) which described the scattering of closed strings.^[16] The formulas of Veneziano and Virasoro were understood at the time in terms of so-called dual resonance models, but later their work was understood in the context of string theory.^[17][18]

Soon after his discovery of the Virasoro-Shapiro amplitude, Virasoro introduced what became known as the Virasoro algebra, an infinite-dimensional Lie algebra which described the conformal symmetry of the worldsheet of a string as it travels through spacetime. Several mathematical concepts related to Lie algebras and conformal field theory are named after Virasoro. These include the Virasoro vertex operator algebra and the Virasoro minimal model.

Pedagogical introductions to the Virasoro-Shapiro amplitude and the Virasoro algebra may be found in David Tong's introductory lectures on string theory.^[19]

Spin glasses[]

In Italy, Virasoro studied spin glasses and other systems in statistical mechanics. Together with Italian physicist Giorgio Parisi and French physicist Marc Mézard, Virasoro discovered the ultrametric organization of low-temperature spin glass states in infinite dimensions.^[20]

References[]