ISLQG
20 Jan 2023
Nominations for the 2026 Bronstein Prize in Loop Quantum Gravity Invited
Nominations for the 2026 Bronstein Prize are invited. The nominee should hold a (non-faculty) post-doctoral position at the time of the nomination deadline. The primary criterion will be high quality of scientific results in loop quantum gravity, interpreted in the broadest sense, creativity and originality, and the significance of results to the field as a whole. Previous winners are:
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.
The nomination packet should consist of
(i) an approx. one page nomination letter summarizing the specific achievements to date of the nominee;
(ii) a complete CV and a publication list of the nominee;
(iii) two letters of support from experts emphasizing the broad significance of all research contributions to date of the nominee; and
(iv) a proposed citation. Self-nominations will not be considered.
The entire packet should be bundled into a single PDF file and e-mailed to
bronstein@cstq.org. Please use this address also if you need more information. Deadline for sending nominations is end of February.
The prize, which consists of a certificate and a monetary reward, will be presented during the Loops’26 International Conference on Quantum Gravity, to be held in Hangzhou, China, on 24–29 May 2026.
Historical Background
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].
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.