Paolo Di Vecchia (born October 29, 1942, in Terracina) is an Italian theoretical physicist who works in the field of elementary particle physics, quantum field theory and string theory.
In 1974 he became Assistant Professor at the NORDITA in Copenhagen. In 1978 he came back for a year at CERN. In 1979 he became a professor at the Free University of Berlin and from 1980 to 1986 he taught at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal. Sine 1986 he has been a professor at NORDITA. Since NORDITA moved to Stockholm he spent half of the time there and half of the time at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen.
In the 1970s Di Vecchia was one of the pioneers of string theory. Among other things, he formulated with Lars Brink and others the locally supersymmetric Lagrangian for fermionic strings (i.e. those with fermionic excitations, half-integer spin). Previously, the Nambu-Goto action had been known for the bosonic string and different groups tried to construct a fermionic action.
In 1972, along with Emilio Del Giudice and Sergio Fubini, he introduced the "DDF states" scheme (also known as the "DDF construction"),[1] which is named by the initials of the three scientists.
Along with Stanley Deser and Bruno Zumino he formulated[2] string theory as a two-dimensional analogue of the general theory of relativity.
Afterwards, he turned his investigations to instantons in quantum field theory and other. He returned to string theory in 1981 with the publication of the works by Alexander Polyakov who used the effect of Di Vecchia and colleagues for the quantization of strings, then known as the Polyakov action.
In the 2000s he focused on the expansion of the AdS/CFT correspondence to low supersymmetric and non-conformal gauge theories,[3][4][5] the construction of four-dimensional effective Lagrangians for lower energies from the compactification of magnetised D-brane models,[6] and the high-energy scattering of closed strings in the framework of the theory of D-branes.
Since 1994, he has been organizing Scandinavian conferences for string theory at NORDITA.
Locally supersymmetric action for the superstring in Andrea Cappelli, Elena Castellani, Filippo Colomo, Di Vecchia (ed.) The birth of string theory , Cambridge University Press 2012
with Emilio Del Giudice and Sergio Fubini, "General properties of the dual resonances model", Annals of Physics 70, 1972, 378–398.
with Lars Brink, Stanley Deser, Bruno Zumino Paul S. Howe, "Locally supersymmetry for spinning particles", Physics Letters B, Volume 64, 1976, pp. 435-438
Brink, Howe A locally supersymmetric and reparametrization invariant action for the spinning string, Physics Letters B Volume 65, 1976, pp. 471-474
Editor with JL Petersen: "Perspectives in String Theory." Proc. NORDITA / Niels Bohr Institute Meeting, Copenhagen October 1987, World Scientific, 1988
with Antonella Liccardo: "Gauge theories from D branes" in Pierre Cartier et al. Frontiers in Number Theory, Physics and Geometry, Volume 2, Springer, 2007, Arxiv
