Prof. Frank Wilczek

Professor Wilczek's professional work has touched on a large variety of questions in theoretical physics. Abiding interests include:

(*) "pure" particle physics, especially connections between ambitious theoretical ideas and concrete observable phenomena (e.g. applications of asymptotic freedom, unification of couplings);

(*) the behavior of matter at ultra-high temperature and/or density (e.g. phase structure of QCD, application to cosmology, neutron stars and stellar explosions);

(*) the application of insights from particle physics to cosmology (e.g. axions as dark matter candidates, search techniques for these and for WIMPs);

(*) the application of field theory techniques to condensed matter physics (e.g. exotic quantum numbers on solitons of various sorts, statistical transmutation and fractional statistics in the quantum Hall effect);

(*) the quantum theory of black holes (e.g. existence of quantum hair, classical hair and entropy of string-theoretic holes).