Education
Siegel did his undergraduate and graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, graduating with a Doctor of Philosophy.
Siegel did his undergraduate and graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, graduating with a Doctor of Philosophy.
He is a professor at the C. North. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics at Stony Brook University in New New York in 1977. Following his graduation he worked at several postdoctoral appointments at Harvard (7/77-7/79), Brandeis University (3/79-6/79), the Institute for Advanced Study (8/79-8/80), Caltech (8/80-8/82) and University of California, Berkeley (8/82-8/85). He served as an assistant professor at the University of Maryland, College Park from 1985-1987 before becoming a professor at Stony Brook University in 1987.
His early work involved the use of superspace to treat supersymmetric theories, including supergravity.
Grisaru, and M. Rocek he discovered methods for both deriving classical actions, and performing Feynman graph calculations more simply than those in nonsupersymmetric theories. He discovered a new version of dimensional regularization ("dimensional reduction") which preserves supersymmetry, and is also commonly used in QCD. The first supersymmetric nonrenormalization theorem was introduced by Grisaru, Siegel and Rocek in their 1979 paper "Improved methods for supergraphs", which has close to 700 citations.
During the 1980s, Siegel invented covariant string field theory and began to pioneer research in string field theory. With Barton Zwiebach he generalized methods outside of string theory to give a universal free field theory action for arbitrary representations of the Poincaré group in arbitrary dimensions.
He also introduced new gauge symmetries of classical mechanics useful for strings.
In subsequent work, Siegel made contributions to physicist"s understanding of duality, conformal invariance, AdS/CFT, the random matrix approach to string theory, twistor superstrings, and other topics in string theory. His most recent work has been on North=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills.