Gruber Cosmology Prize for Viatcheslav Mukhanov

The cosmologist Prof. Dr. Viatcheslav Mukhanov from the Faculty of Physics of the LMU and Principal Investigator of the Excellence Cluster Universe receives the 2013 Gruber Cosmology Prize together with Alexei Starobinsky for their formative contributions to inflationary theory, an essential component for understanding the evolution and structure of the universe.

The Gruber Cosmology Prize honors leading cosmologists that substantially contribute to the understanding of the universe. The award is presented annually by the Gruber Foundation, which has its headquarter at Yale University. The prize is endowed with 500,000 Dollar.

According to the Prize citation, the theoretical work of Viatcheslav Mukhanov an Alexei Starobinsky “changed our views on the origin of our universe and on the mechanism of its formation of structure.” Thanks to their contributions, scientists have provided a compelling solution to two of the essential questions of cosmology: Why is the structure of the universe so uniform on the largest scales? Where did the departures from uniformity - such as galaxies, planets, and people - come from?

Viatcheslav Mukhanov was one of the researchers who founded the inflationary theory of the universe, according to which the universe extended with extremely fast speed at the very beginning. In 1981, he was the first who founded the quantum mechanical origin of large scale structures in the universe. His calculations were confirmed thirty years later by the observations of the cosmic background radiation. In his most recent research, he developed the the model of K-essence to explain why dark energy dominates the universe.

In 2011, Viatcheslav Mukhanov received the "Chaire Blaise Pascal," the highest honor awarded by France to foreign scientists. He is also a recipient of the gold medal of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, the Oskar Klein Medal, which is awarded by the University of Stockholm and the Nobel Prize Committee, the Amaldi Gold Medal of the Italian Society of General Relativity. In 2009, he was awarded with the price of the Tomalla Foundation for Gravity Research in Switzerland.

Further Information:
Press release of the LMU
Press release of the Gruber Foundation

Contact:
Prof. Dr. Viatcheslav Mukhanov
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Arnold Sommerfeld Center for Theoretical Physics
Theresienstr. 3780333 München
Tel.: +49.89.2180-4543
E-Mail: viatcheslav.mukhanov@physik.lmu.de