Nima Arkani-Hamed

Nima Arkani-Hamed (; born April 5, 1972) is an Iranian-American-Canadian theoretical physicist, with interests in high-energy physics, quantum field theory, string theory, cosmology and collider physics. Arkani-Hamed is a member of the permanent faculty at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he is also director of the Carl P. Feinberg Cross-Disciplinary Program in Innovation. He is also director of The Center for Future High Energy Physics (CFHEP) in Beijing, China.

Early life Nima Arkani-Hamed was born on April 5, 1972, in Houston, Texas, to Jafargholi "Jafar" Arkani-Hamed and Hamideh Alasti, both physicists from Iran. His father, a native of Tabriz, worked for the NASA Apollo program in the 1970s, and later taught earth and planetary sciences at McGill University in Montreal.

Arkani-Hamed spent his early childhood in the United States. In 1979, following the Iranian Revolution, he and his family returned to Iran after the new government claimed that greater freedom of expression and new opportunities would be available. In 2008, he joined the School of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, as a professor, and in 2021 he became the inaugural Carl P. Feinberg Director of the Cross-Disciplinary Program there.

Since 2013, Arkani-Hamed has been a leading figure in research on the amplituhedron, a geometric structure that simplifies calculations of particle interactions in certain quantum field theories.

Honors and awards

In 2003, Arkani-Hamed won the Gribov Medal of the European Physical Society, and in the summer of 2005 while at Harvard he won the Phi Beta Kappa chapter's award for teaching excellence. In 2008, he won the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize given at Tel Aviv University to young scientists who have made outstanding and fundamental contributions in Physical Science. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009. He gave the Messenger lectures at Cornell University in 2010, and was an A. D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University from 2013 to 2019. In 2012 he was an inaugural awardee of the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, the creation of physicist and internet entrepreneur, Yuri Milner. He was one of six physicists featured in the award-winning 2013 documentary film Particle Fever, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2017. In 2021, he was awarded the Sakurai Prize of the American Physical Society.

Personal views Nima identifies himself as an atheist. On 21 April 2016, he gave a public talk titled, The Morality of Fundamental Physics at Cornell University and said:...part of my motivation for giving this talk is that like many physicists, many scientists, I'm an atheist. But unlike some atheists, I'm certainly not a militant atheist. And I dislike a lot a certain strand of militant atheism.... I don't believe in God. I do, however, think that instead of worshiping a vast and unknowable God, we can devote ourselves to this slow unveiling of the vastness of truth in all of its glory....