Two theories for real particles and one toy model with no physical counterpart turn out to forbid exactly the same collisions. The shared reason: curves, drawn on surfaces — a geometry that never refers to a particle moving through spacetime at all.
Carolina Figueiredo, a Ph.D. student in the Princeton University Department of Physics, found that three quantum field theories with no obvious relationship to one another obey the same hidden rule. Two govern real particles — gluons and pions. The third is a “toy model” with no direct physical counterpart, the kind theorists keep around because it is simpler to compute in, not because anything is made of it. All three, it turns out, forbid exactly the same set of particle collisions. WEB
The shared reason is geometric. Working with her advisor Nima Arkani-Hamed and collaborators, Figueiredo showed the forbidden-collision rule falls out of curves drawn on surfaces — a framework now called surfaceology. The curves encode the physics directly: no particle trajectories through spacetime, no sum over Feynman diagrams, and by report a more efficient route to the same predictions than either. One technical anchor for this framework, co-authored with Arkani-Hamed, Qu Cao, Jin Dong, and Song He, is “Surface Kinematics and ‘The’ Yang-Mills Integrand” (arXiv:2408.11891; published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 134, 171601). CITED
Her own description of the semester the connection came together: “It was a whole semester of surprises.” WEB
On April 20, 2026, the Breakthrough Prize Foundation awarded Figueiredo the inaugural Vera Rubin New Frontiers Prize, named for the astrophysicist Vera Rubin. The official citation: “For contributions to the geometric structure of scattering amplitudes, revealing hidden relations among quantum field theories.” The prize was presented by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and investor Yuri Milner; future years will honor three women within two years of their Ph.D. rather than one. WEB
Figueiredo earned her undergraduate degree at Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, Portugal, then joined Princeton in 2021, completing her Ph.D. there in 2026 under Arkani-Hamed. She will hold a junior fellowship at Harvard before joining the University of California, Berkeley, as an assistant professor of physics and a member of the Leinweber Institute for Theoretical Physics. Portugal’s president, António José Seguro, publicly congratulated her, calling her “an inspiration to Portugal.” WEB
That surfaceology has been extended to the full Standard Model. It has not: Figueiredo's own account is that the framework currently covers specific particle families, and that reaching the rest is open — in her words, “I cannot tell you exactly how [long] that will take … It is doable at least.” No timeline is claimed here either. OPEN
That spacetime being emergent, rather than fundamental, is an established result of this work. It is not; it is a direction Figueiredo has stated as her own view of where the framework points — “Whatever is the most fundamental description … should become emergent in some way” — not a proof surfaceology itself supplies. OPEN And that surfaceology's kinematic-space geometry has any demonstrated mathematical relationship to this corpus's own contact-geometric machinery. Both describe physics “as geometry instead of dynamics.” That is a shared temperament, not a shared derivation, and no connection between the two is drawn on this page.
| source | accessed | tier |
|---|---|---|
| Princeton Dept. of Physics, “Carolina Figueiredo awarded the 2026 Vera Rubin New Frontiers Prize” (2026-04-20) | 2026-09-22 | WEB |
| Breakthrough Prize Foundation, prize announcement page (breakthroughprize.org/News/98) | 2026-09-22 | WEB |
| The Daily Princetonian, “Inaugural Vera Rubin Prize: Carolina Figueiredo on quantum field theories” (2026-05) | 2026-09-22 | WEB |
| UC Berkeley Division of Mathematical & Physical Sciences, “UC Berkeley welcomes rising stars in math and physics” (2026-09-14) | 2026-09-22 | WEB |
| Arkani-Hamed, Cao, Dong, Figueiredo, He, “Surface Kinematics and ‘The’ Yang-Mills Integrand,” arXiv:2408.11891 (Phys. Rev. Lett. 134, 171601) | 2026-09-22 | CITED |
These are web sources, checked live on the date given, not the held-and-hashed PDFs this corpus prefers for its Tier-1 citations (see docs/floor-texts.tsv). book7/ch-figueiredo-verify.py checks that the exact facts above still print on this page; it cannot re-fetch the web, so it is a presence check against this page's own text, not an independent re-verification of the sources. The underlying selectivity numbers behind “more efficient than Feynman diagrams” are stated in the technical literature, not re-derived here. OPEN