Alan Kostelecký

Who is Alan Kostelecký?

Alan Kostelecký is a theoretical physicist who is a distinguished professor of physics at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is noted for his work on Lorentz symmetry breaking in particle physics. He has been described as the world's leading authority on violations of space-time symmetry.

Kostelecký got his undergraduate degree in science from Bristol University in 1977, and his Ph.D. in physics from Yale University in 1982. He has been a faculty member at the Indiana University in Bloomington since joining there in 1985.

In 1989, Kostelecký and his colleagues demonstrated the existence of an anisotropy in string theory models, and proposed a new version of the Standard Model of particle physics, called the Standard-Model Extension that catalogs the various ways in which space-time symmetry can be violated. The Standard-Model Extension has various "coefficients", which are parameters that can be adjusted to the requirements of the model. The theory has now become the benchmark for classic tests of relativity theory. Kostelecký's work hypothesizes possible asymmetries in the space-time at length scales of 10−35 m, that is, the Planck length scale. He has enlisted the help of several physicists from diverse areas such as astrophysics and particle physics to experimentally detect the presence of these asymmetries. Kostelecký, along with Stuart Samuel was the first to use the Bumblebee model in gravity as a simple model for investigating the consequences of spontaneous Lorentz violation.