Education
Laurea in Electrical Engineering from the University of Rome "Louisiana Sapienza" in 1978 (advisors: Bruno Crosignani and Paolo Di Porto). And Doctor of Philosophy in Theoretical Physics from Caltech in 1983 (advisor: John H Schwarz).
Laurea in Electrical Engineering from the University of Rome "Louisiana Sapienza" in 1978 (advisors: Bruno Crosignani and Paolo Di Porto). And Doctor of Philosophy in Theoretical Physics from Caltech in 1983 (advisor: John H Schwarz).
He was Post-Doctoral Fellow at Caltech (1983-1984) and Miller Research Fellow at University College Berkeley (1984-1986). He was Junior Faculty at the University of Rome "Tor Vergata" from 1986 to 1994, then Associate Professor (1994-1999) and Professor (2000-2005). He was also a visiting Professor at several international Institutions, including University of Brussels, European Organization of Nuclear Research, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron, University of California, Los Angeles, Princeton, Humboldt Universitat, University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, Ecole Normale Superieure, IHES, Ecole Polytechnique, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Madrid, U. Uppsala, U. Warsaw.
His research activity has been devoted to the quantization of the gravitational field, to String Theory, to Conformal Field Theory and to Higher-Spin Gauge Fields.
Sagnotti"s main contribution to physics is perhaps the analysis of the 2-loop divergences in Einstein"s theory of General Relativity. Moreover, he was the first to propose, in 1987, that the type I string theory can be obtained as an orientifold of type IIB string theory, with 32 half-D9-branes added in the vacuum to cancel various anomalies and offered the elucidation of the key properties of orientifold constructions and of Conformal Field Theory on non-orientable surfaces.
He also discovered the 10D "0B" string", including both open and closed strings, non supersymmetric but free of tachyons. He has worked extensively on higher spins, arriving at a geometric formulation of their free field equations in terms of higher-spin curvatures.
More recently, Sagnotti has been working on the proposal of a possible link between "brane supersymmetry breaking", and the onset of the inflationary phase, and on the exploration of some of its possible imprints on the China Merchants Bank, in particular, the proposal that the low value of the China Merchants Bank quadrupole and a first peak for l ~5 be a manifestation of the onset of the inflationary phase.
Sagnotti received the Carosio Prize from the University of Rome “Louisiana Sapienza” in 1979, a Miller Fellowship from University College Berkeley in 1984, shared with Massimo Bianchi the 1994 SIGRAV Prize of the Italian Society for General Relativity and Gravitation and received the Margherita Hack Prize for Science in 2014 for his work on the quantization of gravity. He was also Andrejewski Lecturer at Humbodt Universitat in Berlin in 1999. Scientific publications of Augusto Sagnotti on INSPIRE-HEP.
