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 physics, black hole thermodynamics is the area of study that seeks to reconcile the laws of thermodynamics with the existence of black hole event horizons. As the study of the statistical mechanics of black-body radiation led to the development of the theory of quantum mechanics, the effort to understand the statistical mechanics of black holes has had a deep impact upon the understanding of quantum gravity, leading to the formulation of the holographic principle.
In particle physics, the hypothetical dilaton particle is a particle of a scalar field that appears in theories with extra dimensions when the volume of the compactified dimensions varies. It appears as a radion in Kaluza–Klein theory's compactifications of extra dimensions. In Brans–Dicke theory of gravity, Newton's constant is not presumed to be constant but instead 1/G is replaced by a scalar field and the associated particle is the dilaton.
In theoretical physics, the anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory correspondence is a conjectured relationship between two kinds of physical theories. On one side are anti-de Sitter spaces (AdS) that are used in theories of quantum gravity, formulated in terms of string theory or M-theory. On the other side of the correspondence are conformal field theories (CFT) that are quantum field theories, including theories similar to the Yang–Mills theories that describe elementary particles.
The Immirzi parameter is a numerical coefficient appearing in loop quantum gravity (LQG), a nonperturbative theory of quantum gravity. The Immirzi parameter measures the size of the quantum of area in Planck units. As a result, its value is currently fixed by matching the semiclassical black hole entropy, as calculated by Stephen Hawking, and the counting of microstates in loop quantum gravity.
In general relativity, Regge calculus is a formalism for producing simplicial approximations of spacetimes that are solutions to the Einstein field equation. The calculus was introduced by the Italian theoretician Tullio Regge in 1961.
In probability theory, the Schramm–Loewner evolution with parameter κ, also known as stochastic Loewner evolution (SLEκ), is a family of random planar curves that have been proven to be the scaling limit of a variety of two-dimensional lattice models in statistical mechanics. Given a parameter κ and a domain in the complex plane U, it gives a family of random curves in U, with κ controlling how much the curve turns. There are two main variants of SLE, chordal SLE which gives a family of random curves from two fixed boundary points, and radial SLE, which gives a family of random curves from a fixed boundary point to a fixed interior point. These curves are defined to satisfy conformal invariance and a domain Markov property.
In probability theory and statistical mechanics, the Gaussian free field (GFF) is a Gaussian random field, a central model of random surfaces.
Oded Schramm was an Israeli-American mathematician known for the invention of the Schramm–Loewner evolution (SLE) and for working at the intersection of conformal field theory and probability theory.
Michel Pierre Talagrand is a French mathematician. Doctor of Science since 1977, he has been, since 1985, Directeur de Recherches at CNRS and a member of the Functional Analysis Team of the Institut de mathématiques de Jussieu in Paris. Talagrand was also a faculty member at The Ohio State University for more than fifteen years. Talagrand was elected as correspondent of the Académie des sciences of Paris in March 1997, and then as a full member in November 2004, in the Mathematics section. In 2024, Talagrand received the Abel Prize.
Gregory Francis Lawler is an American mathematician working in probability theory and best known for his work since 2000 on the Schramm–Loewner evolution.
In probability theory, Isserlis' theorem or Wick's probability theorem is a formula that allows one to compute higher-order moments of the multivariate normal distribution in terms of its covariance matrix. It is named after Leon Isserlis.
Group field theory (GFT) is a quantum field theory in which the base manifold is taken to be a Lie group. It is closely related to background independent quantum gravity approaches such as loop quantum gravity, the spin foam formalism and causal dynamical triangulation. Its perturbative expansion can be interpreted as spin foams and simplicial pseudo-manifolds (depending on the representation of the fields). Thus, its partition function defines a non-perturbative sum over all simplicial topologies and geometries, giving a path integral formulation of quantum spacetime.
The R = T model, also known as Jackiw–Teitelboim gravity, is a theory of gravity with dilaton coupling in one spatial and one time dimension. It should not be confused with the CGHS model or Liouville gravity. The action is given by
In physics, Liouville field theory is a two-dimensional conformal field theory whose classical equation of motion is a generalization of Liouville's equation.
A conformal loop ensemble (CLEκ) is a random collection of non-crossing loops in a simply connected, open subset of the plane. These random collections of loops are indexed by a parameter κ, which may be any real number between 8/3 and 8. CLEκ is a loop version of the Schramm–Loewner evolution: SLEκ is designed to model a single discrete random interface, while CLEκ models a full collection of interfaces.
Gady Kozma is an Israeli mathematician. Kozma obtained his PhD in 2001 at the University of Tel Aviv with Alexander Olevskii. He is a scientist at the Weizmann Institute. In 2005, he demonstrated the existence of the scaling limit value of the loop-erased random walk in three dimensions and its invariance under rotations and dilations.
Continuous-variable (CV) quantum information is the area of quantum information science that makes use of physical observables, like the strength of an electromagnetic field, whose numerical values belong to continuous intervals. One primary application is quantum computing. In a sense, continuous-variable quantum computation is "analog", while quantum computation using qubits is "digital." In more technical terms, the former makes use of Hilbert spaces that are infinite-dimensional, while the Hilbert spaces for systems comprising collections of qubits are finite-dimensional. One motivation for studying continuous-variable quantum computation is to understand what resources are necessary to make quantum computers more powerful than classical ones.
Nina Holden is a Norwegian mathematician interested in probability theory and stochastic processes, including graphons, random planar maps, the Schramm–Loewner evolution, and their applications to quantum gravity. She is a Junior Fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Studies at ETH Zurich, and has accepted a position as an associate professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University beginning in 2021.
Jason Peter Miller is an American mathematician, specializing in probability theory.
