Mark Trodden

Mark Trodden is a theoretical cosmology and particle physicist. He was born in Wigan, Greater Manchester, England.

Education

Mark Trodden received both his Bachelor (mathematics) and an advanced Maths/Physics degrees from Cambridge University. After he obtained Maths/Physics degree he spent a year to do research and supervising undergraduates. In 1992, Trodden moved to the USA to do Ph.D. program at Brown University and obtained Ph.D. degree in 1995. He worked as a Research Associate for two years at MIT and two years at Case Western Reserve University after getting his Ph.D. Since 2000, Trodden has been a faculty member at Syracuse University.

Currently Mark Trodden is an Alumni Professor of Physics and leads cosmology research group at Syracuse University. Professor Trodden has recently accepted a position at the University of Pennsylvania and will start there in the spring of 2009 after working as a visiting professor at Cornell in the Fall of 2008.

Research

Mark Trodden's main research areas are the cosmological implications of Quantum Field Theories, General Relativity, and Superstring Theories. Trodden, with Sean Carroll, introduced a new class of topological defects in ordinary field theories. Trodden's work in theoretical studies and understanding of the early universe has been widely cited and relied upon by the scientific community.

Specifically, Trodden's research focuses on configurations consisting of topological solitons which end on others of equal or higher dimension. In such models, the higher dimensional defect provides Dirichlet boundary conditions for the lower dimensional one.

Trodden, with his co-workers Anne-Christine Davis and Steven Davis, has also investigated the particle physics and cosmological properties of topological defects in supersymmetic theories. Their first study, dealing with abelian theories demonstrated that all spontaneously broken abelian supersymmetric theories admit cosmic string solutions which are superconducting due to fermion zero modes. Further, by using supersymmetry transformations, they showed how to calculate the supercurrents in terms of the background string fields. They also managed to extended these results to non-abelian theories and investigated the effects of soft supersymmetry breaking.

Trodden describes himself as a "particle cosmologist."

Academic papers

• Mark Trodden, et al., Is Cosmic Speed-Up Due to New Gravitational Physics?, Physical Review, 2004.
• Mark Trodden, et al., Can the dark energy equation-of-state parameter w be less than -1?, Physical Review, 2003.
• Mark Trodden, et al., The State of the Dark Energy Equation of State, Physical Review, 2003.

References

External links

• Mark Trodden's personal website
• Mark Trodden's papers in SPIRES database

See also

• List of theoretical physicists