Sergio Ferrara

Sergio Ferrara (born May 2, 1945) is an Italian physicist working on theoretical physics of elementary particles and mathematical physics. He is renowned for the discovery of theories introducing supersymmetry as a symmetry of elementary particles (super-Yang–Mills theories, together with Bruno Zumino) and of supergravity, the first significant extension of Einstein's general relativity, based on the principle of "local supersymmetry" (together with Daniel Z. Freedman, and Peter van Nieuwenhuizen). He is an emeritus staff member at CERN and a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Sergio Ferrara was born on 2 May 1945 in Rome, Italy. He graduated from the University of Rome in 1968. Since then he has worked as a CNEN and INFN researcher at the Frascati National Laboratories; as a CNRS Visiting Scientist at the Laboratoire de Physique Théorique, École Normale Supérieure, Paris, and at the Theory Division at CERN, Geneva.

In 1971–1975, Sergio Ferrara did pioneering work on Conformal Field Theory and the Conformal bootstrap. In a series of papers written in collaboration with , Aurelio Grillo and Giorgio Parisi, he studied constraints imposed by conformal symmetry on the operator dimensions, the form of the correlation functions, the operator product expansion, and the conformal partial wave expansion for the four-point correlation functions of the theory. This work, together with the contemporaneous work by Alexander Polyakov, laid the foundations of Conformal Field Theory.