Paul Frampton

Paul Howard Frampton is an English theoretical physicist who works in particle theory and cosmology. From 1996 until 2014, he was the Louis D. Rubin, Jr. Distinguished Professor of physics and astronomy, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is affiliated with the Department of Mathematics and Physics of the University of Salento, in Italy. Born in Kidderminster, England, Frampton attended King Charles School, 1954–62 and then Brasenose College, Oxford, 1962–68. He received BA (Double First) in 1965, MA, DPhil in 1968, and DSc in 1984, all degrees from Oxford University. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1990) and the American Physical Society (1981). In 1987 he was the project director for siting the Superconducting Supercollider, in North Carolina. A Festschrift for his 60th birthday has been published. His DPhil thesis analyzed the relationship between current algebra and superconvergence sum rules, and contained a 1967 sum rule. In 1970, he analyzed the absence of ghosts in the dual resonance model. Three examples of his model building are the chiral color model, in 1987, which predicts axigluons; the 331 model, in 1992, which can explain the number of quark-lepton generations, and predicts bileptons; his proposal, in 1995, of the binary tetrahedral group as a flavor symmetry. All three serve as targets of opportunity for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In 2002, he built a model relating matter–antimatter asymmetry in the early universe to measurements possible on Earth. In 2015, he showed that the 331-model predicts long-lived quarks accessible to Run 2 of the LHC. In formal directions, three examples are that he calculated, in 1976, the rate of vacuum decay in quantum field theory; in 1982, he analyzed ten-dimensional gauge field theory, and its hexagon anomaly, precursor to the first superstring revolution; in 1988, he constructed the Lagrangian which describes the dynamics of the p-adic string.