| Citation | Dr Manton is distinguished for the many seminal contributions he has made to the theory of soliton interactions in two and three spatial dimensions. These include the calculation of the force between two monopoles at large separation (leading to the discovery of exact static solutions to the gauge theory equations), the geometrical description of the classical, quantum and statistical mechanics of solitons, and the discovery of the unstable 'sphaleron' solution to electroweak gauge theory, which defines the mechanism and energy scale for non-perturbative phenomena including baryon and lepton number violation. His other work includes an important contribution to the construction of the theory, containing supergravity and Yang-Mills theory, which is the low-energy limit of superstring theory. |