Gary Gibbons

Gary William Gibbons (born 1 July 1946), FRS, is a British theoretical physicist. Gibbons studied in Cambridge,where in 1969 he became a research student under the supervision of Dennis Sciama. When Sciama moved to Oxford, he became a student of Stephen Hawking, obtaining his PhD from Cambridge in 1973. Apart from a stay at the Max Planck Institute in Munich in the 1970s he has remained in Cambridge throughout his career, becoming a full professor in 1997, a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1999, and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge in 2002.

Having worked on classical general relativity for his PhD thesis, Gibbons focused on the quantum theory of black holes afterwards. Together with Malcolm Perry, he used thermal Green's functions to prove the universality of thermodynamic properties of horizons, including cosmological event horizons [cite journal
title = Cosmological Event Horizons, Thermodynamics, and Particle Creation
author = Gibbons, G. W., Hawking, S. W.
journal = Physical Review
volume = D 15
issue =
pages = 2738–2751
year = 1977
doi = 10.1103/PhysRevD.15.2738
url = ] . He developed the Euclidean approach to quantum gravity with Stephen Hawking, which allows a derivation of the thermodynamics of black holes from a functional integral approach. [cite journal
title = Action Integrals and Partition Functions in Quantum Gravity
author = Gibbons, G. W., Hawking, S. W.
journal = Physical Review
volume = D 15
issue =
pages = 2752–2756
year = 1977
doi = 10.1103/PhysRevD.15.2752
url = ] As the Euclidean action for gravity is not positive definite, the integral only converges when a particular contour is used for conformal factors. [cite journal
title = Path Integrals and the Indefiniteness of the Gravitational Action
author = Gibbons, G. W., Hawking, S. W., Perry, M. J.
journal = Nucl. Phys.
volume = B 138
issue =
pages = 141–150
year = 1978
doi = 10.1016/0550-3213(78)90161-X
url = ]

His work in more recent years includes contributions to research on supergravity, p-branes [cite journal
title = Born-Infeld particles and Dirichlet p-branes
author = Gibbons, G. W.
journal = Nucl. Phys.
volume = B 514
issue =
pages = 603–639
year = 1998
doi =
url = http://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/9709027
format = subscription required] and M-theory, mainly motivated by string theory. Gibbons remains interested in geometrical problems of all sorts which have applications to physics.

References

Books

* "Euclidean Quantum Gravity", [http://www.worldscibooks.com/physics/1301.html World Scientific (Singapore, 1993)] ; Paperback ISBN 9810205163

Related Pages

* Gibbons-Hawking-York boundary term
* Euclidean quantum gravity
* Gibbons-Hawking effect

External links

* [http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/gr/about/members/gibbons.html Gary Gibbons' faculty page at Cambridge]