We are pleased to announce that Francesco Benini, Professor of Theoretical Physics at SISSA, has been awarded the prestigious 2025 Frontiers of Science Award in Physics for his article “Black Holes in 4D 𝒩=4 Super-Yang-Mills Field Theory”, co-authored with SISSA alumna Elisa Milan, published in Physical Review X in 2018.
The award was established in 2023 under the International Congress of Basic Science (ICBS) and is sponsored by the City of Beijing and the Beijing Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Applications (BIMSA). Benini’s work has been honoured in the area of String Theory and Quantum Gravity.
The Frontiers of Science Award is given to a scientific paper from the past decade that has made a significant breakthrough in its field. Each year, researchers from around the world are invited to nominate candidates, and an expert jury selects a shortlist for each research area. A Global Committee, appointed by the ICBS, then chooses the winners from the finalists.
The awarded paper addresses one of the most fascinating open problems in modern theoretical physics — reconciling Einstein’s theory of general relativity with the principles of quantum mechanics — and investigates this issue in the context of black hole physics.
According to Einstein’s theory of gravitation and established mathematical theorems, black holes are possibly the simplest and most featureless objects in nature. As later understood by Bekenstein and Hawking, in the quantum world they must instead possess enormous “entropy”; that is, they must be capable of storing a huge amount of information and therefore must have extremely detailed features. The article makes an important step toward reconciling these two perspectives through a detailed and thorough understanding of the peculiar properties that black holes exhibit once quantum mechanics is intertwined with general relativity. This was made possible by exploiting the so-called “holographic principle”: the idea that the complete behaviour of quantum gravity in a region of space can be reliably described in terms of an auxiliary system that lives in one fewer dimension, along the boundary of that region, and that does not involve gravity. By adopting such a powerful framework, the somewhat mysterious thermodynamic properties of arguably the most fascinating phenomena in gravity — black holes — become more tractable.
Uncovering the quantum properties of black holes becomes particularly urgent now, as we witness tremendous advances in observational astrophysics, opening the exciting opportunity to test predictions of quantum gravity in the near future.
The award ceremony will take place in July 2025 during the International Congress of Basic Science in Beijing, a major international event gathering leading researchers from the mathematical and physical sciences.