| Citation | By means of international collaborations and by his personal leadership at King's College, West has developed the theory of supersymmetry and its application to the construction of unified theories of all the fundamental particle interactions. He was the first to realise and prove that perturbative quantum corrections to the effective potential all vanish owing to supersymmetry. Other seminal contributions were (a) his reformulation of supergravity theory in four-dimensional space-time so as to render supersymmetry manifest "off-shell", thereby facilitating the inclusion of matter; (b) the explicit construction of the two special supergravity theories in ten-dimensional space-time (now known as IIA and IIB) displaying the maximal degree of supersymmetry; (c) his proof that gauge theories in four-dimensional space-time with N=4 supersymmetry possess exact (super)conformal symmetry in the quantum theory and (d) the discovery of other examples with less supersymmetry. These results have become cornerstones of the modern theory of superstrings and associated branes to which West continues to contribute actively. |