Gary Gibbons

For the American cardiologist, see Gary H. Gibbons.

Gary Gibbons FRS
Gary Gibbons at Harvard University, c. 2005
Born	Gary William Gibbons (1946-07-01) 1 July 1946 Coulsdon, London, England
Education	Purley County Grammar School
Alma mater	University of Cambridge (BA, PhD)
Known for	Gibbons–Hawking ansatz Gibbons–Hawking space Gibbons–Hawking effect Gibbons–Hawking–York boundary term
Awards	PhD (1973) FRS (1999)
Scientific career
Fields	Theoretical physics Euclidean quantum gravity
Institutions	University of Cambridge Trinity College, Cambridge Max Planck Institute for Physics
Thesis	Some aspects of gravitational radiation and gravitational collapse (1973)
Doctoral advisor	Dennis Sciama Stephen Hawking
Doctoral students	Chris Hull
Website	damtp.cam.ac.uk/people/g.w.gibbons

Gary William Gibbons FRS (born 1 July 1946) is a British theoretical physicist.

Education

Gibbons was born in Coulsdon, Surrey. He was educated at Purley County Grammar School and the University of Cambridge, where in 1969 he became a research student under the supervision of Dennis Sciama. When Sciama moved to the University of Oxford, he became a student of Stephen Hawking, obtaining his PhD from Cambridge in 1973.

Career and research

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. 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. As the Euclidean action for gravity is not positive definite, the integral only converges when a particular contour is used for conformal factors.

His work in more recent years includes contributions to research on supergravity, p-branes and M-theory, mainly motivated by string theory. Gibbons remains interested in geometrical problems of all sorts which have applications to physics.

Awards and honours

Gibbons was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1999. His nomination reads

Distinguished for his contributions to General Relativity and the Quantum Theory of Gravity. He played a leading role in the development of the Euclidean approach to quantum gravity and showed how it could be used to understand the thermal character of black holes and inflating universes. This revealed a deep and unexpected relationship between gravitation and thermodynamics. As part of the Euclidean quantum gravity programme, he discovered many of the known gravitational instantons and classified their properties. In the more conventional Lorentzian approach to gravity, he has studied the behaviour of solitons in gauge theories and General Relativity and has shown how supersymmetry leads to Bogomolny inequalities on the masses and charges. More recently he has been investigating the role of topology in gravity and has obtained important restrictions on how the topology of spacetime can change. He is recognised world wide as a leader in the field.