Emil John Martinec (born 1958) is an American string theorist, a physics professor at the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago, and director of the Kadanoff Center for Theoretical Physics. He was part of a group at Princeton University that developed heterotic string theory in 1985.[1]
Martinec was born October 4, 1958,[2]inDowners Grove, Illinois. He graduated from Northwestern University in 1979 and earned his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1984, with a dissertation titled, Quantum Mechanics Versus General Covariance In Gravity And String Models, advised by Michael Peskin.[3] He worked the last two years of his graduate education at SLAC, following Peskin's move there.
Early in his career, Martinec worked at Princeton University, where he was part of a research group known as the "Princeton string quartet" that also included physicists David Gross, Jeffrey A. Harvey and Ryan Rohm.[4] The group developed heterotic string theory in 1985.[5] As its name suggests, heterotic string theory combines elements of multiple versions of string theory to attempt to create a more realistic explanation of elementary particle physics. This work was part of a series of advances that forestalled the predicted merger of cosmology and fundamental physics.[6]
He is currently a professor at the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago. He directs the university's Kadanoff Center for Theoretical Physics.[7]
Martinec is co-author of six papers that SLAC's inSPIRE database classifies as "renowned" (having 500 or more citations apiece):[8]
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