Education and career
Jafferis was privately home-schooled and at age 14 began his studies at Yale University, where he graduated with a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics in 2001. He received his PhD in physics from Harvard University in 2007. His PhD thesis Topological string theory from D-brane bound states was supervised by Cumrun Vafa. [2] [3] Jafferis was from 2007 to 2010 a post-doctoral fellow at Rutgers University [ citation needed ] and from June 2010 to March 2011 a temporary member at the Institute for Advanced Study. [4] He is a tenured professor of physics at Harvard University. [1]
In 2008, Jafferis was, with Ofer Aharony, [5] Oren Bergman, [6] and Juan Maldacena, [7] one of the discoverers of the AdS-CFT correspondence of superconformal (N=6) Chern-Simons theory in three dimensions to M-theory in , described by M2-branes – these are special branes, the solutions of eleven-dimensional supergravity having three-dimensional world-volume – in (four-dimensional anti-DeSitter space).
In 2012, with Silviu Pufu, [8] Benjamin Safdi, [9] and Igor Klebanov, he formulated a conjecture (conjectural F-theorem) about the behavior of the free energy F in renormalization group flows of a three-dimensional supersymmetric quantum field theory. [10]
In 2016, with Ping Gao [11] and Aron C. Wall, Jafferis proposed a mechanism for traversable wormholes without exotic matter [12] [13] with a description mathematically equivalent to quantum teleportation.
