STONY BROOK, N.Y. — A Stony Brook University researcher has been named a recipient of the 2006 Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics, one of the most prestigious honors awarded by the American Physical Society for his role in the discovery of supergravity. Distinguished Professor Peter van Nieuwenhuizen of Stony Brook's C.N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics and the Department of Physics and Astronomy, will receive the prize along with co-recipients Daniel Z. Freedman of MIT and Sergio Ferrara of the European Center for Nuclear Research.

The award recognizes the discovery of supergravity, announced in a series of research papers in 1976, when Freedman was also on the faculty of the Institute of Theoretical Physics and Ferrara was a frequent collaborator there. In 1993, the trio received the prestigious Dirac Medal of the International Center for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, Italy for this work.

Supergravity is one of Stony Brook's greatest contributions to science. It generalized Einstein's theory of gravity by incorporating the then-novel idea of supersymmetry. The combination of these powerful ideas by Ferrara, Freedman and van Nieuwenhuizen showed that gravity may be unified with other forces in nature, and that in fact, this unification will predict as-yet unseen particles and forces between them.

Supergravity quickly became a pillar of mathematical physics. In the following decades its many implications for physics beyond our "Standard Model" of known particles and forces, for string theory and for mathematics have become more and more evident. Indeed now, nearly thirty years later, supergravity is as much a subject of interest as ever. Many of its implications will be tested at the Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle accelerator, soon to be completed at CERN.

The Heineman Prize is one of the oldest and most prestigious of the American Physical Society's international prizes, and has been shared by many Nobel Prize winners and winners of the Fields Medal (the mathematics equivalent of the Nobel Prize). Former Stony Brook winners are Distinguished Professors Barry McCoy of the YITP and James Glimm of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics. The prize will be presented at the 2006 APS April Meeting in Dallas.

With this prize, Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics and Department of Physics and Astronomy faculty have received six major American Physical Society awards over the past seven years. In 1999, the Lars Onsager Prize in statistical physics was awarded to Einstein Professor Emeritus C.N. Yang and the Heineman Prize to Barry McCoy; in 2001, the Bethe Prize for astrophysics was given to Gerald E. Brown and Panofsky Prize for experimental particle physics to Paul Grannis; and in 2003, the J. J. Sakurai Prize for particle theory was awarded to George Sterman.