As part of the celebrations for the World Year of Physics 2005, the University
of Rome "Tor Vergata" will award, during thematic Conferences,
Honorary Degrees in Physics to four eminent scientists whose research activities
reflect the four key areas of interest of its Physics Department: Astrophysics,
Condensed Matter Physics, Nuclei and Particles and Theoretical Physics.
For Theoretical Physics, the Honorary Degree will be awarded to
Sergio Ferrara, and the Thematic conference will focus on
Supergravity, the remarkable supersymmetric extension of
Einstein's General Relativity introduced in 1976 by
Sergio Ferrara of CERN (then at LNF - Frascati), Daniel Z.
Freedman of MIT and Peter van Nieuwenhuizen of the C.N. Yang
Institute for Theoretical
Physics at Stony Brook.
Supergravity has played a pivotal role in Theoretical Physics during the last
thirty years, in particular as a special class of field theories providing the low-energy
manifestation of superstrings. Even more importantly, it has provided a profound
guiding principle for the dualities between superstrings and for their still
largely unexplored connection to M-theory, whose low-energy limit is described
again by a form of supergravity, in eleven dimensions, discovered in 1978 by
Eugene Cremmer, Bernard Julia and the late Joel Scherk of the Ecole Normale
Superieure in Paris.
The Conference will take place at Villa Mondragone, the beautiful Conference
venue of the University located on the Alban hills
overlooking Rome (some pictures may be found in www.villamondragone.it ), on
June 6-8 2005.
It is meant to honor Sergio
Ferrara, a world leader in Theoretical Physics and a founder of Supergravity. It
will include a number of invited contributions by his former collaborators, and
will be concluded on Wednesday, June 8, by a ceremony during which Sergio
Ferrara will receive an Honorary Degree in Physics.
The Conference is supported by INFN (Sections of LNF-Frascati and Tor Vergata),
by the MIUR-COFIN Contract 2003-023852, by the EU contracts MRTN-CT-2004-503369
and MRTN-CT-2004-512194, by the INTAS contract 03-51-6346 and by the NATO Grant
PST.CLG.978785, and is sponsored by SIGRAV, the Italian Society of General Relativity
and Gravitational Physics.
The deadline for registration is May 20, 2005, and there will be a
100 Euro Conference Fee.
Our Secretarial Office will be happy to provide help
for accommodation to all participants, but overall attendance will be limited to
about 100.
I. Antoniadis (CERN), R. Barbieri (Scuola Normale Superiore), L. Castellani (U.
Piemonte Orientale),
R. D'Auria (Politecnico di Torino), J.P. Derendinger (U.
Neuchatel),
P. Di Vecchia (Nordita), P. Fre' (U. Torino), D.Z. Freedman (MIT), L. Girardello (U. Milano Bicocca),
M. Gunaydin (Penn State), B. Julia (Ecole Normale Superieure), C. Kounnas (Ecole
Normale Superieure),
J. Louis (U. Hamburg), D. Lust (Ludwig Maximillian U.), D.V. Nanopoulos
(Texas A&M and Athens Academy),
M.
Porrati (NYU), C. Savoy (CEA Saclay), E. Sokatchev (LAPP-Annecy),
K.S. Stelle
(Imperial College), P. van Nieuwenhuizen (Stony Book), A. van Proeyen (U.
Leuven),
M.A. Vasiliev (Lebedev Institute), F. Zwirner (U. Roma "La Sapienza")
M. Bianchi (U. Roma "Tor Vergata" and INFN), F. Palumbo (INFN-LNF), A. Sagnotti
(U. Roma "Tor Vergata" and INFN, Chair)
Via Frascati 51
00040 Monte Porzio Catone
Phone: +39-06-9401941 - Fax: +39-06-94019439
e-mail: info@villamondragone.it
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