This three-year award supports US-Dutch cooperative research on string theory and cosmological spacetimes involving Vijay Balasubramanian and J. de Boer at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The project will develop three inter-related issues: a) the physics of the cosmological constant and the origin of cosmology from string theory, b) the quantum mechanical origin and nature of gravitational thermodynamics and singularity resolution in cosmological and black hole settings, and c) how time-dependent universes are described in string theory.
The Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Amsterdam is currently one of the premier institutions in Europe doing string theory. The Dutch team has strengths on aspects of unstable systems with open string tachyons, cosmological singularities in string theory, the physics of de Sitter space, AdS/CFT correspondence, the construction of a holographic dual description of Minkowski space, brane destabilization in highly curved backgrounds, and on conformal field theory, non-commutative superspace, and supersymmetric gauge theories. These strengths complement those of the US team.
