This award funds the research activities of Professor Jared Kaplan at Johns Hopkins University.
During the last few decades, a velvet revolution has changed the way we think about spacetime, gravity, and the fundamental laws of nature. The most crucial breakthrough was the discovery of the AdS/CFT correspondence, which describes gravity in d + 1 dimensions using a d-dimensional, "holographic" theory. The purpose of this project is to understand the robust features of a correspondence between gravitational theories in anti-de-Sitter (AdS) spacetimes and non-gravitational theories with conformal symmetries, and to generalize this so-called "AdS/CFT" correspondence to other spacetimes. This will make it possible to understand the generic features of quantum gravity. Professor Kaplan will also expand on a nascent program characterizing general holographic dualities in terms of bulk effective field theories, and will study various possible generalizations of the AdS/CFT correspondence to situations in which conformal symmetry is broken.
This project also has several broader impacts. The proposed research will be an excellent training ground for postdocs and graduate students, with its wide variety of challenging problems that connect holography to phenomenology and experiment. Both the theoretical and phenomenological side of high-energy physics inspire others by addressing the simplest questions in profound and beautiful ways, thereby drawing students into important STEM careers while providing them with rigorous quantitative skills. Professor Kaplan will also be actively engaged in teaching and mentoring at Johns Hopkins University. Finally, Professor Kaplan will be involved in the Hopkins QuarkNet program, through which he will connect Baltimore high-school teachers and students with cutting-edge ideas in theoretical physics.
