Following the
1979 Islamic Revolution, Arkani-Hamed's family decided to return to Iran, as the new Iranian government promised free expression and possibilities.[11] The
Cultural Revolution, however, which followed shortly after the 1979 Revolution, resulted in Iran's universities being forcefully shut down.[11] Arkani-Hamed's father, Jafar, who at the time worked at Sharif University in Tehran, wrote a petition with his colleagues denouncing the closures.[11] Arkani-Hamed's father and his colleagues were subsequently blacklisted by the new government; those who were caught were either imprisoned or hanged according to Arkani-Hamed's father.[11] His father, who subsequently had to go underground, spent his entire life savings to get himself and his family out of the country.[11] Arkani-Hamed, who was 10-years old at the time, fled with his family to Canada.[11]
In 1999 he joined the faculty of the
University of California, Berkeley physics department. He took a leave of absence from Berkeley to visit
Harvard University beginning January 2001, and stayed at Harvard as a professor from 2002 to 2008.[12] Since 2008, he has been a professor in the School of Natural Sciences at the
Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.[13]
Since 2013, Arkani-Hamed has been a leader in research on the
amplituhedron as a geometric structure that simplifies calculations of
particle interactions in certain
quantum field theories.
In 2021 he became the first Carl P. Feinberg Director of the Cross-Disciplinary Program in Innovation at the Institute for Advanced Study.[14]
Honors and awards
In 2003 he won the
Gribov Medal of the
European Physical Society, and in the summer of 2005 while at Harvard he won the
Phi Beta Kappa award for teaching excellence. In 2008, he won the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize given at
Tel Aviv University to young scientists who have made outstanding and fundamental contributions in Physical Science.[15] He was elected to the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009.[16] He gave the
Messenger lectures at Cornell University in 2010, and was an
A. D. White Professor-at-Large at
Cornell University from 2013 to 2019.[17] In 2012 he was an inaugural awardee of the
Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, the creation of physicist and internet entrepreneur,
Yuri Milner.[18] He was one of six physicists featured in the award-winning 2013 documentary film
Particle Fever, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2017. In 2021, he was awarded the Sakurai Prize of the American Physical Society.