This award funds the research activities of Professors Petr Horava, Mina Aganagic, Raphael Bousso and Yasunori Nomura at Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics, University of California, Berkeley.
In the first decade of the 21st century, we witnessed a remarkable convergence of the fundamental questions about the origin, structure and the future fate of our Universe. Now, in the middle of the second decade, we experience the exciting confrontation of the fundamental theoretical questions (what is the Universe made of? what are matter, energy, space and time?, etc.) with the experimental data which are now becoming available in experimental particle physics, observational cosmology and astrophysics. These experimental findings are in turn challenging the remarkable developments on the theoretical front. The co-PIs of this award will perform fundamental theoretical research at these crossroads of particle physics, quantum gravity, cosmology and string theory, confronting the experimental challenges from beyond the Standard Model, the ideas of the multiverse, the interface of string theory and condensed-matter physics, the nature of space and time, and the mathematical implications of topological strings. Research in this area thus advances the national interest by promoting the progress of science in one of its most fundamental directions: the discovery and understanding of new physical law. The significant broader impacts of this research include the training of students and postdocs who become the next generation of scientists in the nation and the world. The fundamental questions addressed in this research are of deep interest to the general public, and the co-PIs will continue promoting the importance and excitement of fundamental science to the general public.
More specifically, Mina Aganagic will focus on the interplay of string theory and gauge theories with pure mathematics. She will study the refined topological string, the refined Chern-Simons theory and M-theory. Raphael Bousso will work on extracting predictions from the multiverse, and the interconnections of geometry, holography and information, as recently crystallized in the black-hole "firewall" conundrum. He will further study the string landscape and the holographic entropy bounds. Petr Horava will study quantum gravity, especially in the context known as "Horava-Lifshitz gravity" and its broad applications, including the puzzles of naturalness in particle phenomenology and cosmology, and implications to condensed-matter physics. He will apply methods of nonequilibrium field theory to quantum gravity and strings. Yasunori Nomura will work on ideas relevant to the recent and upcoming experiments, such as the LHC, with emphasis on supersymmetry breaking and its mediation, the origin and nature of dark matter, and the conceptual understanding of the implications of the multiverse for the TeV-scale physics. All four co-PIs will seek unexpected new opportunities for transformative interdisciplinary research in all areas related to theoretical particle physics.
