Maldacena This US-Mexico award will support Prof. Juan M. Maldacena of Harvard University in a research collaboration with Prof. Hugo Morales of the Physics Department of the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana in Mexico City. The researchers intend to work on the quantum aspects of systems that, in the context of general relativity, present gravitational fields intense enough to require a quantum description. Black holes and cosmological models are obviously connected with such a quest.
The researchers intend to work within the framework of string theory, using recent results on the entropy of extremal and nearly extremal black holes, intending to expand the theory to cover more general black holes. Comparison of these results with those in canonical quantum general relativity for the same type of black holes will be given. The collaboration will combine the expertise of the Mexican group of researchers in canonical quantum gravity with the expertise in string theory of the US investigators, one of the leading groups in this area worldwide. ***
