This award funds the research activities of Professors Eric D'Hoker, Michael Gutperle, and Per Kraus at the University of California, Los Angeles.
String theory remains the most promising candidate for the unification of the Standard Model of elementary particles with General Relativity, the theory of gravitational forces, in a framework consistent with the laws of Quantum Mechanics. Developments in string theory over the past decades have spawned progress in many areas of physics and mathematics, thereby serving the national interest by promoting the progress of science in one of its most fundamental directions: the discovery and understanding of new physical laws. Professors D'Hoker, Gutperle, and Kraus aim to deepen the understanding of string theory, quantum gravity, and black-hole physics by exploring new symmetry principles, new connections with pure mathematics, and by performing sophisticated calculations at the frontier of string theory. This project will also have significant broader impacts. String theory continues to attract and inspire some of the brightest graduate students and postdocs in physics, and Professors D'Hoker, Gutperle, and Kraus will involve graduate students and postdocs in their research while actively mentoring them on their path to becoming professional scientists. Workshops organized with other universities in Southern California will serve to introduce junior physicists at UCLA to the broader community of researchers, while interactions with students during visits to local middle and high schools will promote public outreach.
At a more technical level, Professor D'Hoker continues to advance the subject of superstring perturbation theory, its applications to the low-energy effective interactions of supergravity, and its implications for the high-energy behavior of string amplitudes. Professor Gutperle will investigate five-dimensional super-conformal field theories, as well as domain wall, surface, and line operators in conformal field theories utilizing the AdS/CFT correspondence. Professor Kraus will study conformal field theories in various dimensions, with an emphasis on elucidating structures that have implications for quantum gravity via the AdS/CFT correspondence. Professors D'Hoker, Gutperle, and Kraus will also use conformal-bootstrap methods to study the properties of the conformal field theory which is holographically dual to Type IIB string theory on AdS3.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
