One of the landmark pursuits of theoretical physics is to quantize the gravitational interaction. String theory provides a perturbative approach, but requires extra particles, symmetries, and spacetime dimensions. Worst of all, string theory fails as a framework in expanding spacetimes—and it just so happens that our universe is expanding at an exponential rate .

Luckily, string theory has led to the development of holographic dualities, such as the AdS/CFT correspondence (learn about it here ), which posits that spacetime physics emerges as a strong-coupling, many-body limit of quantum systems that do not interact gravitationally.

My research aims to understand how spacetime horizon physics is encoded using such dualities, and explore models that incorporate the expansion of spacetime. Some approaches that I have taken in the past include:

• Low-dimensional models of classical and quantum gravity, and their holographic duals
  • For example: thermalization as a dual of gravitational black hole collapse
• Supersymmetric matrix quantum mechanics as a toy model for string theoretic black holes
• Disordered systems as a model of cold , fragmented black holes
• Quantum field theory on a rigid de Sitter background, including
  • The constraints imposed by symmetries and unitarity
  • The cosmological wavefunction and how it controls the infrared of loop integrals