Carolina Figueiredo GS named inaugural winner of Vera Rubin New Frontiers Prize

Physics graduate student Carolina Figueiredo GS won $50,000 as the inaugural laureate of the Breakthrough Prize Foundation’s Vera Rubin New Frontiers Prize on April 18. She was the sole recipient of the prize in its founding year, chosen for her Ph.D. research at Princeton that unearthed “hidden relations among quantum field theories.”

The Breakthrough Prize Foundation, founded by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and science philanthropist Yuri Milner among others in 2012, honors international researchers in the fundamental sciences. Figueiredo’s adviser Nima Arkani-Hamed, a visiting lecturer with the rank of professor at Princeton and professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, received a Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics himself in 2012.

“I’m extremely happy and honored, and everything about being the inaugural winner, it’s amazing,” Figueiredo told The Daily Princetonian. “I was not expecting [it] at all. I didn’t even know of the existence of the prize, obviously, because it didn’t exist before.”

The Vera Rubin prize specifically recognizes female physicists within two years following their Ph.D. Figueiredo, who came to Princeton in 2021, is graduating this year. 

Rubin was an American astronomer known for her work in confirming the presence of dark matter, and was awarded an honorary doctorate from Princeton in 2005. She was barred from Princeton’s astronomy program in the 1940s due to the University’s policy of not admitting women at the time.

On the growing representation of women in the sciences, Figueiredo said, “As I see it, there’s been a growth of the number of women in science over the last two decades — more than that. It’s fantastic to have these extra recognitions, but besides that, you just start seeing it, and you don’t get to think so much about it.”

Figueiredo received her bachelor’s degree at the Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, Portugal. Since her undergraduate days, she “was always very obsessed with trying to understand things as simply as possible.” 

“I felt like that was something I tried during undergrad, and it became even more important that I kept trying to do that in my Ph.D.,” she added.

Figueiredo’s awarded work began with something that looked, at first, like a coincidence. Her work began with three theories in particle physics that were previously believed disparate. However, she proved that all three were linked, each prohibiting the same set of particle collisions.

“It was a whole semester of surprises,” Figueiredo said, recalling how the pattern emerged during her first year of Ph.D. research. She had initially noticed the vanishing probabilities in one simple theory, then tried to see if the same held for a second. It did. Then a third. She said she worked “out of curiosity, not with much hope that something would work out.”

The explanation, which took until the winter of the winter of 2022 to develop, turned out to be geometric. All three theories share a single underlying mathematical structure: curves drawn on surfaces. This concept, now called surfaceology, can reproduce the predictions of conventional physics without ever tracking how individual particles move through space and time. Where the traditional approach relies on Feynman diagrams — intricate pictures that map out every possible way particles can interact across spacetime — surfaceology sidesteps that entirely, reaching the same answers through pure geometry.

In conventional physics, spacetime is the stage where everything happens. Surfaceology suggests the stage might be optional.

When asked whether she considers spacetime to be genuinely emergent or still speculative, Figueiredo pointed to a convergence of arguments from quantum mechanics and general relativity. Probing shorter distances requires higher energies, hence the enormity of experiments like CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. But gravity sets a hard limit: Concentrate enough energy into a small enough region and a black hole is formed. “Whatever is the most fundamental description,” she told the ‘Prince,’ “should become emergent in some way.” 

Arkani-Hamed has long pushed the emergent spacetime program forward. Surfaceology is among its sharpest concrete results.

The new geometric framework of surfaceology currently applies to specific families of particles. Extending it to cover the full Standard Model, the complete inventory of particles and forces observed in nature, remains an open problem. “I cannot tell you exactly how [long] that will take,” Figueiredo said, “It is doable at least.”

Following the announcement of the prize, she was congratulated by Portuguese President  António José Seguro for the prize. “Today is a day of pride for Portugal,” he wrote on Instagram in Portuguese.

“Don’t be too concerned about not knowing everything,” Figueiredo said as advice for the future generation of fundamental scientists, “Because there’s a lot to know.”

Daphne Lewis is a staff News writer for the ‘Prince.’ She is from Washington, D.C. and can be reached at dl1424[at]princeton.edu.

Haeon Lee is the associate News editor for the ‘Prince’ leading research coverage. She is from Brooklyn, N.Y. and often covers campus research and academic departments. She can be reached at hl1389[at]princeton.edu.

Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.