Bronstein Board
The Matvei Petrovich Bronstein Prize for Research in Loop Quantum Gravity
During the celebration of 25 years of Loop Quantum Gravity at Madrid, a new prize for post-doctoral scholars in loop quantum gravity was created. It is named after Matvei Petrovich Bronstein, who was the first to emphasize that quantum gravity requires a deep revision of classical space-time concepts. He wrote his PhD thesis on Quantization of Gravitational Waves in 1935. He clearly understood the limitation of applying the Bohr-Rosenfeld QED measurement analysis to gravity. He derived the quantum analog of Einstein’s quadrupole formula but emphasized the need to go beyond linearized gravity. For details, see the republication and translation into English of his 1936 paper on the quantum theory of weak gravitational fields [1,2]. He was considered by many as the brightest of the young Soviet physicists in the mid-1930s. He was arrested during the Great Purge on trumped-up charges in 1937 and convicted by a so-called list trial and executed on the same day in 1938. An account appears in the afterword (external link) of ref. [3].
The previous awardees of the Bronstein Prize are listed below.
2024: Dr. Beatriz Elizaga Navascués, currently junior faculty at Universidad de Castilla - La Mancha, Toledo, Spain.
2022: Dr. Daniele Pranzetti, currently junior faculty at Università degli Studi di Udine, Udine, Italy.
2019: Dr. Wolfgang Wieland, currently DFG Heisenberg Fellow at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen, Germany.
2017: Assoc. Prof. Mercedes Martín Benito, currently faculty member at Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain.
2015: Prof. Edward Wilson-Ewing, currently faculty member at University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, Canada.
2013: Prof. Eugenio Bianchi, currently faculty member at The Pennsylvania State University, University Park – PA, USA.
Governance
The Bronstein Prize is administrated by a board and three chairs (Jorge Pullin, Carlo Rovelli, Lee Smolin). The prize consists of a certificate and a monetary reward, which is financed by the chairs.
Application
Applications for the 2026 Bronstein Prize have been closed.
References
[1] Matvei P. Bronstein, “Quantentheorie schwacher Gravitationsfelder”, in Physikalische Zeitschrift der Sowjetunion, Band 9, Heft 2–3, pp. 140–157 (1936); reprinted in: Alexander S. Blum and Dean Rickles, Quantum Gravity in the First Half of the Twentieth Century: A Sourcebook, Berlin: Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften, 2018, doi:10.34663/9783945561317-22.
[2] Matvei P. Bronstein, “Quantum theory of weak gravitational fields,” Gen. Rel. Grav. 44 (2012) 267–283, translated from German by M.A. Kurkov, edited by S. Deser, doi:10.1007/s10714-011-1285-4.
[3] Gennady E. Gorelik, Victor Ya. Frenkel, Matvei Petrovich Bronstein and Soviet Theoretical Physics in the Thirties, Birkhäuser Basel,1994, doi:10.1007/978-3-0348-8488-4.