Daniel Louis Jafferis (born July 23, 1983, in West Haven, Connecticut)[citation needed] is an American theoretical physicist, known for his research on quantum gravity, supersymmetric quantum field theory, and string theory.[1]

Education and career

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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.

Awards and honors

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In 2012 Jafferis received the Henry Primakoff Award of the American Physical Society for "construction and study of three-dimensionals supersymmetric quantum field theories."[14] In 2019 he was awarded the New Horizons in Physics Prize for "fundamental insights about quantum information, quantum field theory, and gravity."[15]

Selected publications

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  • Aharony, Ofer; Bergman, Oren; Jafferis, Daniel Louis; Maldacena, Juan (2008). "𝒩 = 6 superconformal Chern-Simons-matter theories, M2-branes and their gravity duals". Journal of High Energy Physics (10): 091. doi:10.1088/1126-6708/2008/10/091.
  • Jafferis, Daniel Louis; Tomasiello, Alessandro (2008). "A simple class of 𝒩 = 3 gauge/Gravity duals". Journal of High Energy Physics (10): 101. doi:10.1088/1126-6708/2008/10/101.
  • Aharony, Ofer; Bergman, Oren; Jafferis, Daniel Louis (2008). "Fractional M2-branes". Journal of High Energy Physics (11): 043. arXiv:0807.4924. Bibcode:2008JHEP...11..043A. doi:10.1088/1126-6708/2008/11/043.
  • Jafferis, Daniel L.; Klebanov, Igor R.; Pufu, Silviu S.; Safdi, Benjamin R. (2011). "Towards the F-theorem: N=2 field theories on the three-sphere". Journal of High Energy Physics (6): 102. arXiv:1103.1181. Bibcode:2011JHEP...06..102J. doi:10.1007/JHEP06(2011)102.
  • Jafferis, Daniel L. (2012). "The exact superconformal R-symmetry extremizes Z". Journal of High Energy Physics (5): 159. arXiv:1012.3210. Bibcode:2012JHEP...05..159J. doi:10.1007/JHEP05(2012)159.
  • Jafferis, Daniel L.; Pufu, Silviu S. (2014). "Exact results for five-dimensional superconformal field theories with gravity duals". Journal of High Energy Physics (5): 32. Bibcode:2014JHEP...05..032J. doi:10.1007/JHEP05(2014)032.
  • Guarino, Adolfo; Jafferis, Daniel L.; Varela, Oscar (2015). "String Theory Origin of Dyonic 𝒩 = 8 Supergravity and Its Chern-Simons Duals". Physical Review Letters. 115 (9): 091601. arXiv:1504.08009. Bibcode:2015PhRvL.115i1601G. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.115.091601. PMID 26371639.
  • Jafferis, Daniel L.; Lewkowycz, Aitor; Maldacena, Juan; Suh, S. Josephine (2016). "Relative entropy equals bulk relative entropy". Journal of High Energy Physics (6): 4. arXiv:1512.06431. Bibcode:2016JHEP...06..004J. doi:10.1007/JHEP06(2016)004.
  • Jafferis, Daniel L.; Suh, S. Josephine (2016). "The gravity duals of modular Hamiltonians". Journal of High Energy Physics (9): 68. Bibcode:2016JHEP...09..068J. doi:10.1007/JHEP09(2016)068.
  • Gao, Ping; Jafferis, Daniel Louis; Wall, Aron C. (2017). "Traversable wormholes via a double trace deformation". Journal of High Energy Physics (12): 151. arXiv:1608.05687. Bibcode:2017JHEP...12..151G. doi:10.1007/JHEP12(2017)151.

References

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  1. ^ a b "Daniel L. Jafferis". Department of Physics, Harvard University.
  2. ^ Daniel Louis Jafferis at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  3. ^ Academic Tree of Cumrun Vafa
  4. ^ "Daniel Louis Jafferis". Institute for Advanced Study. 9 December 2019.
  5. ^ "Ofer Aharony - Scholars | Institute for Advanced Study". 9 December 2019.
  6. ^ "Oren Bergman - Physics Department, Technion".
  7. ^ Ofer Aharony, Oren Bergman, Daniel Louis Jafferis, Juan Maldacena: N=6 superconformal Chern-Simons-matter theories, M2-branes and their gravity duals, JHEP 0810:091, 2008, Arxiv
  8. ^ "Silviu Pufu". Physics Department, Princeton University.
  9. ^ "Benjamin Safdi | Physics Department". U.C. Berkeley.
  10. ^ Jafferis, Igor Klebanov, S. Pufu, B. Safdi, Towards the F-Theorem: N=2 field theories on the 3-sphere, JHEP 1106:102, 2011, Arxiv
  11. ^ "Ping Gao". Simons Foundation.
  12. ^ Natalie Wolchover: Newfound Wormhole Allows Information to Escape Black Holes, Quanta Magazine, October 23, 2017
  13. ^ Ping Gao, Daniel Jafferis, Aron C. Wall: Traversable Wormholes via a Double Trace Deformation, JHEP 2017, Arxiv 2016
  14. ^ "DPF Prizes and Awards for 2012". DPF Newsletter, APS Division of Particles and Fields. October 23, 2011.
  15. ^ "Professor Daniel Jafferis awarded New Horizon Physics Prize". Center for the Fundamental Laws of Nature, High Energy Theory Group, Harvard University. October 17, 2018.