Douglas Stanford

Last updated
Douglas Stanford
CitizenshipUnited States
Education
Awards
Scientific career
Fields Theoretical physics
Institutions
Thesis Black Holes and the Butterfly Effect  (2004)
Doctoral advisor Leonard Susskind

Douglas Stanford is an American theoretical physicist. He is an associate professor of physics at Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics of Stanford University. [1] 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. [2] [3]

Contents

Early life and education

Douglas Stanford was born in Anacortes, Washington. He attended Anacortes Senior High school. Stanford graduated from the Stanford University in 2009 with B.S. in physics and mathematics. He earned an M.S. in mathematics from the University of Cambridge in 2010. [4] He earned his Ph.D. in physics in 2014 from Stanford University, under the guidance of Leonard Susskind. [5] [6] [2]

Career

Research

Stanford worked at Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton from September 2014 to April 2019 as a post-doctoral researcher. [4] [5] He worked with Juan Maldacena on his and Leonard Susskind's ER-EPR conjecture of the equivalence of wormholes (the ER stands for Einstein-Rosen Bridge) and EPR for quantum entangled particle pairs. The assumption arose as a suggestion to explain the information paradox of black holes, which was heightened by the firewall paradox of Joseph Polchinski. [7] During this time, he worked with Edward Witten on Fermionic localization of the Schwarzian theory. [8] In 2019, Stanford joined Stanford University as an assistant professor. As of 2020, he was an associate professor of physics at Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics. [1]

Awards and honours

In 2017, Douglas Stanford was awarded the Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists for his works in quantum gravity and condensed matter physics. In 2018, Stanford was awarded the 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. [2] [3] The prize is worth $100,000. In 2019, Stanford was awarded the Gribov Medal by the European Physical Society for his work on quantum chaos and its relation to the near-horizon dynamics of black holes. [9]

Selected publications

Related Research Articles

The holographic principle is a property of string theories and a supposed property of quantum gravity that states that the description of a volume of space can be thought of as encoded on a lower-dimensional boundary to the region — such as a light-like boundary like a gravitational horizon. First proposed by Gerard 't Hooft, it was given a precise string theoretic interpretation by Leonard Susskind, who combined his ideas with previous ones of 't Hooft and Charles Thorn. Leonard Susskind said, “The three-dimensional world of ordinary experience––the universe filled with galaxies, stars, planets, houses, boulders, and people––is a hologram, an image of reality coded on a distant two-dimensional surface." As pointed out by Raphael Bousso, Thorn observed in 1978 that string theory admits a lower-dimensional description in which gravity emerges from it in what would now be called a holographic way. The prime example of holography is the AdS/CFT correspondence.

M-theory is a theory in physics that unifies all consistent versions of superstring theory. Edward Witten first conjectured the existence of such a theory at a string theory conference at the University of Southern California in 1995. Witten's announcement initiated a flurry of research activity known as the second superstring revolution. Prior to Witten's announcement, string theorists had identified five versions of superstring theory. Although these theories initially appeared to be very different, work by many physicists showed that the theories were related in intricate and nontrivial ways. Physicists found that apparently distinct theories could be unified by mathematical transformations called S-duality and T-duality. Witten's conjecture was based in part on the existence of these dualities and in part on the relationship of the string theories to a field theory called eleven-dimensional supergravity.

In physics, string theory is a theoretical framework in which the point-like particles of particle physics are replaced by one-dimensional objects called strings. String theory describes how these strings propagate through space and interact with each other. On distance scales larger than the string scale, a string looks just like an ordinary particle, with its mass, charge, and other properties determined by the vibrational state of the string. In string theory, one of the many vibrational states of the string corresponds to the graviton, a quantum mechanical particle that carries the gravitational force. Thus, string theory is a theory of quantum gravity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edward Witten</span> American theoretical physicist

Edward Witten is an American mathematical and theoretical physicist. He is a professor emeritus in the school of natural sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Witten is a researcher in string theory, quantum gravity, supersymmetric quantum field theories, and other areas of mathematical physics. Witten's work has also significantly impacted pure mathematics. In 1990, he became the first physicist to be awarded a Fields Medal by the International Mathematical Union, for his mathematical insights in physics, such as his 1981 proof of the positive energy theorem in general relativity, and his interpretation of the Jones invariants of knots as Feynman integrals. He is considered the practical founder of M-theory.

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 theoretical physics, the matrix theory is a quantum mechanical model proposed in 1997 by Tom Banks, Willy Fischler, Stephen Shenker, and Leonard Susskind; it is also known as BFSS matrix model, after the authors' initials.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Juan Maldacena</span> Argentine physicist (born 1968)

Juan Martín Maldacena is an Argentine theoretical physicist and the Carl P. Feinberg Professor in the School of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He has made significant contributions to the foundations of string theory and quantum gravity. His most famous discovery is the AdS/CFT correspondence, a realization of the holographic principle in string theory.

In theoretical physics, 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) which 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) which are quantum field theories, including theories similar to the Yang–Mills theories that describe elementary particles.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Leonard Susskind</span> American physicist (born 1940)

Leonard Susskind is an American physicist, who is a professor of theoretical physics at Stanford University, and founding director of the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics. His research interests include string theory, quantum field theory, quantum statistical mechanics and quantum cosmology. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an associate member of the faculty of Canada's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, and a distinguished professor of the Korea Institute for Advanced Study.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Black hole information paradox</span> Mystery of disappearance of information in a black hole

The black hole information paradox is a puzzle that appears when the predictions of quantum mechanics and general relativity are combined. The theory of general relativity predicts the existence of black holes that are regions of spacetime from which nothing — not even light — can escape. In the 1970s, Stephen Hawking applied the semi-classical approach of quantum field theory in curved spacetime to such systems and found that an isolated black hole would emit a form of radiation called Hawking radiation. Hawking also argued that the detailed form of the radiation would be independent of the initial state of the black hole, and would depend only on its mass, electric charge and angular momentum.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stephen Shenker</span> American physicist

Stephen Hart Shenker is an American theoretical physicist who works on string theory. He is a professor at Stanford University and former director of the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics. His brother Scott Shenker is a computer scientist.

The Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics (SITP) is a research institute within the Physics Department at Stanford University. Led by 16 physics faculty members, the institute conducts research in High Energy and Condensed Matter theoretical physics.

Patrick Hayden is a physicist and computer scientist active in the fields of quantum information theory and quantum computing. He is currently a professor in the Stanford University physics department and a distinguished research chair at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Prior to that he held a Canada Research Chair in the physics of information at McGill University. He received a B.Sc. (1998) from McGill University and won a Rhodes Scholarship to study for a D.Phil. (2001) at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Artur Ekert. In 2007 he was awarded the Sloan Research Fellowship in Computer Science. He was a Canadian Mathematical Society Public Lecturer in 2008 and received a Simons Investigator Award in 2014.

Black hole complementarity is a conjectured solution to the black hole information paradox, proposed by Leonard Susskind, Larus Thorlacius, and Gerard 't Hooft.

A black hole firewall is a hypothetical phenomenon where an observer falling into a black hole encounters high-energy quanta at the event horizon. The "firewall" phenomenon was proposed in 2012 by physicists Ahmed Almheiri, Donald Marolf, Joseph Polchinski, and James Sully as a possible solution to an apparent inconsistency in black hole complementarity. The proposal is sometimes referred to as the AMPS firewall, an acronym for the names of the authors of the 2012 paper. The potential inconsistency pointed out by AMPS had been pointed out earlier by Samir Mathur who used the argument in favour of the fuzzball proposal. The use of a firewall to resolve this inconsistency remains controversial, with physicists divided as to the solution to the paradox.

ER = EPR is a conjecture in physics stating that two entangled particles are connected by a wormhole and is thought by some to be a basis for unifying general relativity and quantum mechanics into a theory of everything.

In theoretical physics, a continuous spin particle (CSP), sometimes called an infinite spin particle, is a massless particle never observed before in nature. This particle is one of Poincaré group's massless representations which, along with ordinary massless particles, was classified by Eugene Wigner in 1939. Historically, a compatible theory that could describe this elementary particle was unknown; however, 75 years after Wigner's classification, the first local action principle for bosonic continuous spin particles was introduced in 2014, and the first local action principle for fermionic continuous spin particles was suggested in 2015. It has been illustrated that this particle can interact with matter in flat spacetime. Supersymmetric continuous spin gauge theory has been studied in three and four spacetime dimensions.

Olaf Lechtenfeld is a German mathematical physicist, academic and researcher. He is a full professor at the Institute of Theoretical Physics at Leibniz University, where he founded the Riemann Center for Geometry and Physics.

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Suvrat Raju is an Indian physicist. He is known for his work on black holes. He was awarded the 2019 ICTP Prize and the 2022 Nishina Asia award.

References

  1. 1 2 "Douglas Stanford | Institute for Theoretical Physics". sitp.stanford.edu. Retrieved 2020-02-02.
  2. 1 2 3 University, Stanford (2017-12-03). "Douglas Stanford wins Breakthrough New Horizons Prize". Stanford News. Retrieved 2020-02-02.
  3. 1 2 "Breakthrough Prize – Fundamental Physics Breakthrough Prize Laureates – Douglas Stanford". breakthroughprize.org. Retrieved 2020-02-02.
  4. 1 2 "Douglas Stanford | Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists". blavatnikawards.org. Retrieved 2020-02-02.
  5. 1 2 "Douglas Stanford". Institute for Advanced Study. Retrieved 2020-02-02.
  6. "Douglas Stanford". Simons Foundation. 2016-01-25. Retrieved 2020-02-02.
  7. Maldacena, Juan; Stanford, Douglas; Yang, Zhenbin (2017-04-18). "Diving into traversable wormholes". Fortschritte der Physik. 65 (5): 1700034. arXiv: 1704.05333 . Bibcode:2017ForPh..6500034M. doi:10.1002/prop.201700034. S2CID   119511398.
  8. Stanford, Douglas; Witten, Edward (October 2, 2017). "Fermionic localization of the schwarzian theory" (PDF). Journal of High Energy Physics. 2017 (10): 8. arXiv: 1703.04612 . Bibcode:2017JHEP...10..008S. doi:10.1007/JHEP10(2017)008. S2CID   119353376.
  9. "Douglas Stanford is awarded the 2019 Gribov Medal by the European Physical Society | Institute for Theoretical Physics". sitp.stanford.edu. Retrieved 2020-02-02.