Allan Adams | |
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| Born | |
| Alma mater | Harvard College UC Berkeley Stanford University |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Theoretical physics, ocean engineering, oceanography |
| Institutions | Harvard University Massachusetts Institute of Technology Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution |
| Doctoral advisor | Eva Silverstein |
Allan Adams is an American physicist and oceanographer. His research in physics has focused on string theory, QFT, and fluid dynamics, while his work in oceanography and ocean engineering have focused on high-precision optical sensing and imaging and on low-cost scalable instrumentation. He currently leads the Future Ocean Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is a visiting oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
Adams earned degrees in physics from Harvard College, UC Berkeley, and Stanford University before joining the faculty of the MIT Department of Physics in 2008. [1] Adams opened the Future Ocean Lab at MIT in January 2017, and became a Visiting Investigator at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in 2018. In 2021, Adams co-founded Station B, a non-profit ocean engineering field station in Bermuda.
Adams is an avid sailplane pilot, cave diver, and father of two boys. He is married to MIT cognitive neuroscientist Rebecca Saxe.
Adams was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows before joining the faculty at MIT. Adams has received numerous awards for his teaching and monitorship, including MIT's School of Science Teaching Prize, the Buechner Teaching and Advising Prizes, and the Baker Memorial Award. [2] His introductory lectures on Quantum Mechanics are freely available via MIT OpenCourseWare and have been viewed more than 10 million times. [3] His talks on gravitational waves at TED 2016 and TED 2014 have been viewed more than 4.7 million times. [4]
A tachyon or tachyonic particle is a hypothetical particle that always travels faster than light. Physicists believe that faster-than-light particles cannot exist because they are inconsistent with the known laws of physics. If such particles did exist they could be used to send signals faster than light. According to the theory of relativity this would violate causality, leading to logical paradoxes such as the grandfather paradox. Tachyons would exhibit the unusual property of increasing in speed as their energy decreases, and would require infinite energy to slow down to the speed of light. No verifiable experimental evidence for the existence of such particles has been found.
In physics, quintessence is a hypothetical form of dark energy, more precisely a scalar field, postulated as an explanation of the observation of an accelerating rate of expansion of the universe. The first example of this scenario was proposed by Ratra and Peebles (1988) and Wetterich (1988). The concept was expanded to more general types of time-varying dark energy, and the term "quintessence" was first introduced in a 1998 paper by Robert R. Caldwell, Rahul Dave and Paul Steinhardt. It has been proposed by some physicists to be a fifth fundamental force. Quintessence differs from the cosmological constant explanation of dark energy in that it is dynamic; that is, it changes over time, unlike the cosmological constant which, by definition, does not change. Quintessence can be either attractive or repulsive depending on the ratio of its kinetic and potential energy. Those working with this postulate believe that quintessence became repulsive about ten billion years ago, about 3.5 billion years after the Big Bang.
String field theory (SFT) is a formalism in string theory in which the dynamics of relativistic strings is reformulated in the language of quantum field theory. This is accomplished at the level of perturbation theory by finding a collection of vertices for joining and splitting strings, as well as string propagators, that give a Feynman diagram-like expansion for string scattering amplitudes. In most string field theories, this expansion is encoded by a classical action found by second-quantizing the free string and adding interaction terms. As is usually the case in second quantization, a classical field configuration of the second-quantized theory is given by a wave function in the original theory. In the case of string field theory, this implies that a classical configuration, usually called the string field, is given by an element of the free string Fock space.
In theoretical physics, twistor theory was proposed by Roger Penrose in 1967 as a possible path to quantum gravity and has evolved into a widely studied branch of theoretical and mathematical physics. Penrose's idea was that twistor space should be the basic arena for physics from which space-time itself should emerge. It has led to powerful mathematical tools that have applications to differential and integral geometry, nonlinear differential equations and representation theory, and in physics to general relativity, quantum field theory, and the theory of scattering amplitudes. Twistor theory arose in the context of the rapidly expanding mathematical developments in Einstein's theory of general relativity in the late 1950s and in the 1960s and carries a number of influences from that period. In particular, Roger Penrose has credited Ivor Robinson as an important early influence in the development of twistor theory, through his construction of so-called Robinson congruences.
In condensed matter physics, a supersolid is a spatially ordered material with superfluid properties. In the case of helium-4, it has been conjectured since the 1960s that it might be possible to create a supersolid. Starting from 2017, a definitive proof for the existence of this state was provided by several experiments using atomic Bose–Einstein condensates. The general conditions required for supersolidity to emerge in a certain substance are a topic of ongoing research.
Induced gravity is an idea in quantum gravity that spacetime curvature and its dynamics emerge as a mean field approximation of underlying microscopic degrees of freedom, similar to the fluid mechanics approximation of Bose–Einstein condensates. The concept was originally proposed by Andrei Sakharov in 1967.
Igor R. Klebanov is an American theoretical physicist. Since 1989, he has been a faculty member at Princeton University where he is currently a Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics and the director of the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science. In 2016, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Since 2022, he is the director of the Simons Collaboration on Confinement and QCD Strings.
Subir Sachdev is Herchel Smith Professor of Physics at Harvard University specializing in condensed matter. He was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2014, and received the Lars Onsager Prize from the American Physical Society and the Dirac Medal from the ICTP in 2018. He was a co-editor of the Annual Review of Condensed Matter Physics from 2017–2019.
Magnetic catalysis is a physics phenomenon, which is defined as an enhancement of dynamical symmetry breaking by an external magnetic field in quantum field theory, used for the description of quantum (quasi-)particles in particle physics, nuclear physics and condensed matter physics. The underlying phenomenon is a consequence of the strong tendency of a magnetic field to enhance binding of oppositely charged particles into bound states. The catalyzing effect comes from a partial restriction of the motion of charged particles in the directions perpendicular to the direction of the magnetic field. Commonly, the magnetic catalysis is specifically associated with spontaneous breaking of flavor or chiral symmetry in quantum field theory, which is enhanced or triggered by the presence of an external magnetic field.
In strong interaction physics, light front holography or light front holographic QCD is an approximate version of the theory of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) which results from mapping the gauge theory of QCD to a higher-dimensional anti-de Sitter space (AdS) inspired by the AdS/CFT correspondence proposed for string theory. This procedure makes it possible to find analytic solutions in situations where strong coupling occurs, improving predictions of the masses of hadrons and their internal structure revealed by high-energy accelerator experiments. The most widely used approach to finding approximate solutions to the QCD equations, lattice QCD, has had many successful applications; however, it is a numerical approach formulated in Euclidean space rather than physical Minkowski space-time.
The Bousso bound captures a fundamental relation between quantum information and the geometry of space and time. It appears to be an imprint of a unified theory that combines quantum mechanics with Einstein's general relativity. The study of black hole thermodynamics and the information paradox led to the idea of the holographic principle: the entropy of matter and radiation in a spatial region cannot exceed the Bekenstein–Hawking entropy of the boundary of the region, which is proportional to the boundary area. However, this "spacelike" entropy bound fails in cosmology; for example, it does not hold true in our universe.
Gary T. Horowitz is an American theoretical physicist who works on string theory and quantum gravity.
Matthew Peter Headrick is an American physicist who is an Associate Professor of Physics at Brandeis University. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 2002 under Shiraz Minwalla and his A.B from Princeton University in 1994. Headrick is known for his contributions to the quantum information perspective on holography.
A. W. Peet is a professor of physics at the University of Toronto. Peet's research interests include string theory as a quantum theory of gravity, quantum field theory and applications of string theory to black holes, gauge theories, cosmology, and the correspondence between anti-de Sitter space and conformal field theories.
Douglas Stanford is an American theoretical physicist. He is an associate professor of physics at Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics of Stanford University. His research interests include quantum gravity, quantum field theory and string theory. Stanford was awarded the 2018 New Horizons in Physics Prize by Fundamental Physics Prize Foundation for his work on improving the understanding of quantum mechanics of black holes via chaos theory.
Melanie Becker was a physicist known for her research into string theory. She was a tenured professor of physics at Texas A&M University upon her death in 2020.
In quantum gravity and quantum complexity theory, the complexity equals action duality (CA-duality) is the conjecture that the gravitational action of any semiclassical state with an asymptotically anti-de Sitter background corresponds to quantum computational complexity, and that black holes produce complexity at the fastest possible rate. In technical terms, the complexity of a quantum state on a spacelike slice of the conformal field theory dual is proportional to the action of the Wheeler–DeWitt patch of that spacelike slice in the bulk. The WDW patch is the union of all possible spacelike slices of the bulk with the CFT slice as its boundary.
The spectral dimension is a real-valued quantity that characterizes a spacetime geometry and topology. It characterizes a spread into space over time, e.g. a ink drop diffusing in a water glass or the evolution of a pandemic in a population. Its definition is as follow: if a phenomenon spreads as , with the time, then the spectral dimension is . The spectral dimension depends on the topology of the space, e.g., the distribution of neighbors in a population, and the diffusion rate.
Turbulent phenomena are observed universally in energetic fluid dynamics, associated with highly chaotic fluid motion involving excitations spread over a wide range of length scales. The particular features of turbulence are dependent on the fluid and geometry, and specifics of forcing and dissipation.
The absolutely maximally entangled (AME) state is a concept in quantum information science, which has many applications in quantum error-correcting code, discrete AdS/CFT correspondence, AdS/CMT correspondence, and more. It is the multipartite generalization of the bipartite maximally entangled state.
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