Lance J. Dixon

Lance Dixon received his B.S. in Physics and Applied Mathematics from Caltech in 1982, and his Ph.D. in Physics from Princeton University in 1986. He was a post-doctoral fellow at SLAC for one year before his appointment as an assistant professor at Princeton. In 1989 he returned to SLAC as a Panofsky Fellow. He became an associate professor at SLAC in 1992, and full professor in 1998. He has been a visiting professor at the École Normale Superieure and Durham University, a visiting fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge, and a scientific associate at CERN. He is currently Professor, Particle Physics and Astrophysics at Stanford University.

Starting in the 1990s Dixon developed, with Zvi Bern and others, new methods (generalized unitarity methods among others) for the calculation of Feynman diagrams in quantum chromodynamics (QCD) and other Yang–Mills theories. These new methods became more relevant with the requirements of the Large Hadron Collider calculations in the 2000s and also provided new insights into the divergences in the supergravity perturbation series. His 1991 publication with Vadim S. Kaplunovsky and Jan Louis has over 800 citations. In 1995 Dixon was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He was named an outstanding referee for the APS in 2008.

In 2014, with Zvi Bern and David Kosower, Dixon received the J. J. Sakurai Prize for “pathbreaking contributions to the calculation of perturbative scattering amplitudes, which led to a deeper understanding of quantum field theory and to powerful new tools for computing QCD processes.” He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022. In 2023, along with Zvi Bern and David Kosower, he received the Galileo Galilei Medal “for the development of powerful methods for high-order perturbative calculations in quantum field theory.”

Learn more about Lance here.