Leonardo Rastelli, Director
Leonardo Rastelli is a Professor at the Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics (YITP), Stony Brook. He received his PhD from MIT in 2000. He was a Dicke Fellow (2000-2002) and an Assistant Professor (2002-2006) at Princeton University before joining the YITP in 2006. Rastelli is the recipient of an Outstanding Junior Investigator award, of a Simons Fellowship, and of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and has been a Blavatnik national finalist. Rastelli's research interests have ranged from structural aspects of string theory to purely field-theoretic questions. Rastelli's main current focus is the study of superconformal field theories in various dimensions, by a combination of mathematical physics and numerical experimentation.
Slava Rychkov, Deputy Director
Slava Rychkov is a Professor at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques (Bures-sur-Yvette), and at the École Normale Supérieure (Paris). He received his PhD from Princeton University (2002), followed by postdoctoral appointments at the University of Amsterdam and at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. He was a Professor at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris (2009-2012) and a staff member at the Theoretical Physics Department of CERN in Geneva (2012-2017). Rychkov has been a recipient of the 2014 New Horizons in Physics Prize and of the 2019 Mergier-Bourdeix Grand Prix by the French Academy of Sciences. His past work covers a wide range of subjects from pure mathematics to particle physics and string theory, and his main current interest is in developing efficient techniques for solving strongly coupled quantum field theories.
Christopher Beem, Principal Investigator
Christopher Beem is an Associate Professor of Mathematical Physics at the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford and a Tutorial Fellow at Saint John's College. He received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley (2010), after which he held postdoctoral research positions at the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook University (2010-2013) and at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2013-2016). His current research focuses on the algebraic properties of supersymmetric and superconformal quantum field theories.
Simon Caron-Huot, Principal Investigator
Simon Caron-Huot is an Assistant Professor at McGill University. He received his PhD in 2009 from McGill, then was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study and at the Niels Bohr Institute. Caron-Huot’s research revolves around the strong force (QCD). His work aims to develop new calculation techniques to describe the interactions between quarks and gluons, and new exact methods to solve a variety of strongly coupled models. In 2017 Caron-Huot was awarded the Gribov Medal.
Miguel Costa, Principal Investigator
Miguel Costa is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Sciences of Porto University, Portugal. He received his PhD from Cambridge University in 1998 and then worked as postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University (1998-2000) and at École Normale Supérieure in Paris (2000-02), before joining Porto Univeristy. Costa's research interests have covered a range of topics in string theory, including black hole physics, cosmology and particle physics. He is the recipient of the Gulbenkian Foundation Science prize of 2004. Currently his main research interests are focused in the subjects of conformal field theory and of gauge/gravity duality.
Liam Fitzpatrick, Principal Investigator
Liam Fitzpatrick joined Boston University as an Assistant Professor of Physics in 2015. He received his PhD from Harvard University, followed by postdoctoral positions at Boston University and Stanford University. He has been interested in applications of quantum field theory across many areas, including cosmology, astrophysics, materials, and the search for Beyond the Standard Model physics. His present research is mainly focused on using the conformal bootstrap to learn about quantum gravity in three dimensions through the AdS/CFT correspondence.
Thomas Hartman, Principal Investigator
Thomas Hartman is an Assistant Professor at Cornell University. He received his PhD from Harvard University, and did postdoctoral work at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ and at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara. His current work is on strongly coupled quantum field theories and quantum gravity, combining techniques from holographic duality and the conformal bootstrap.
Jared Kaplan, Principal Investigator
Jared Kaplan is an Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins University (JHU). He received his PhD in 2009 from Harvard University, and then worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University and SLAC before joining the faculty of JHU in 2012. As a faculty member, he has been the recipient of an NSF CAREER award and a Sloan Foundation Fellowship. Kaplan has worked on an array of topics including phenomenology, cosmology, and scattering amplitudes, but for the past five years he has focused on the bootstrap approach to AdS/CFT and quantum gravity. He is currently working on the problem of information loss from three-dimensional AdS black holes using two-dimensional CFT techniques.
Ami Katz, Principal Investigator
Ami Katz is an Associate Professor at Boston University. He received his PhD in 2001 from MIT, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington and at SLAC. He was the recipient of an NSF CAREER award and was a Sloan Foundation Fellow. Katz’s interests include application of quantum field theory and effective theory to Beyond the Standard Model physics and condensed matter systems. Presently he is focused on developing Hamiltonian truncation methods for studying non-perturbative phenomena in quantum field theory.
Zohar Komargodski, Principal Investigator
Zohar Komargodski is a Professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. He received his Ph.D. from the Weizmann Institute of Science in 2008. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study (2008-2013) and joined the Weizmann Institute of Science in 2011. Komargodski’s current research interests are in non-perturbative aspects of Quantum Field Theory and their applications to Particle Physics, String Theory, and Condensed Matter. Komargodski is the recipient of several awards, such as the New Horizons in Physics Prize, the Gribov Medal, and the Philippe Meyer Prize in Theoretical Physics.
João Penedones, Principal Investigator
João Penedones is an Assistant Professor at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. He received his PhD in 2007 from Porto University. He then worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow until 2011 at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara and at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, Canada. From 2011 to 2016 he was a Research Fellow at Porto University, Portugal. His main research activities lie in the context of the gauge/gravity duality and the conformal bootstrap approach to conformal field theory. He is currently working on extending the bootstrap approach to massive quantum field theories (S-matrix bootstrap).
David Poland, Principal Investigator
David Poland is an Associate Professor at Yale University. He received his PhD from U.C. Berkeley in 2008. He has also worked at Harvard University as a Postdoctoral Fellow (2008-2011) and at the Institute for Advanced Study as both a Member (2011-2012) and a Junior Visiting Professor (2015-2016). He has also been the recipient of an NSF CAREER award. David’s research is focused on developing new nonperturbative methods for quantum field theory, with applications to particle physics, condensed matter physics, and quantum gravity.
Silviu Pufu, Principal Investigator
Silviu Pufu is an Assistant Professor at Princeton University. He received his PhD from Princeton University in 2011, and then joined the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics as a Pappalardo Postdoctoral Fellow (2011-2013). He is interested in learning about renormalization group flows and conformal field theories by combining various techniques such as the conformal bootstrap, supersymmetric localization, perturbative and non-perturbative methods, and the gauge/gravity duality.
David Simmons-Duffin, Principal Investigator
David Simmons-Duffin is an associate professor at Caltech. David received his PhD from Harvard in 2012, and was a member of the School of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study from 2012-2017. His research is on strongly-coupled quantum field theories, with a focus on conformal field theories and their applications. In 2018, Simmons-Duffin was awarded a Sloan Research fellowship, a DOE Early Career award, and the Hermann Weyl prize.
Balt van Rees, Principal Investigator
Balt van Rees is a lecturer in the Mathematics Department at Durham University, UK. He received his PhD in 2010 from Amsterdam University. Subsequently he was a C.N. Yang Fellow at Stony Brook University (2010-2013) and a fellow at CERN (2013-2015). His research interests cover the gauge/gravity dualities, non-perturbative methods for quantum field theory and supersymmetry. He currently works on supersymmetric field theories and the S-matrix bootstrap.
Pedro Vieira, Principal Investigator
Pedro Vieira is a faculty member at the Perimeter Institute in Canada and a visiting professor at the ICTP-SAIFR in Brazil. Vieira is an expert in integrability and gauge/gravity dualities and is a world leader in the study of supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory — a strongly coupled gauge theory, and one the most interesting CFTs. Recently, he has been studying the S-matrix bootstrap as well. In 2015 he became a Sloan Research Fellow and was awarded the Gribov medal.
Xi Yin, Principal Investigator
Xi Yin is a Professor at Harvard University. He received his PhD from Harvard University (2006), after which he was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows (2006-2008). He has been a recipient of NSF CAREER Award, Sloan Fellowship, Simons Investigator Award, and the New Horizons in Physics Prize. His current research interests are strongly coupled quantum field theories and string dualities.
Affiliated Investigators
Petr Kravchuk
Petr Kravchuk is a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He received his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 2018. Petr's research focuses on developing new tools and techniques for the conformal bootstrap, as well as understanding more general properties of CFTs, such as the structure of CFT Regge trajectories.
Dalimil Mazáč
Dalimil Mazáč is a postdoctoral member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He received his PhD from the University of Waterloo in 2017, and held a joint postdoctoral position at the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics and Stony Brook University (2017-2020). His research focuses on developing analytical approaches to the bootstrap and uncovering mathematical structures underlying quantum field theory.
Miguel Paulos
Miguel Paulos is a CNRS researcher at the Laboratory of Theoretical Physics of the École Normale Supérieure (Paris). He received his PhD at Cambridge in 2010, followed by postdoctoral positions at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris), Brown University and a CERN fellowship as the recipient of a Marie Curie grant. He is interested in aspects of holography, scattering amplitudes and bootstrap methods for conformal and quantum field theories.
Ning Su
SU, Ning is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pisa. He received his PhD from Texas A&M University in 2016, and previously was a postdoctoral researcher at Institute of Theoretical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (2016-2018) and EPFL (2018-2019). His research focuses on developing numerical techniques for bootstrap and their applications to condensed matter and high energy physics.
Alessandro Vichi
Alessandro Vichi is an Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Pisa. He obtained his PhD from École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in 2011, and previously was a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley (2011-2014), a Fellow at CERN (2014-2016) and a Professor Boursier at EPFL (2016-2019). Alessandro's current research focuses on exploring the structure of conformal field theories and their applications to particle physics and critical phenomena in condensed matter or statistical physics.
Sasha Zhiboedov
Sasha Zhiboedov is Senior Staff at the Department of Theoretical Physics at CERN. He received his PhD from Princeton in 2014 and held a postdoctoral position at Harvard. Sasha’s research focuses on bootstrap approaches to CFTs and scattering amplitudes. His research is inspired by the AdS/CFT correspondence or, more generally, connections between gravitational theories and QFTs. Currently he explores properties of higher spin particles and their role in the emergence of local gravitational theories.
Postdocs
João Caetano
João Caetano is a Research Assistant Professor at Simons Center for Geometry and Physics and Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics. He was previously a postdoctoral researcher at École Normale Supérieure in Paris (2015-2018) and obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Waterloo and University of Porto in 2015. His main research interests focus on the exact computations in gauge theories using a combination of the gauge/gravity duality and integrability.
Nikhil Anand
Nikhil Anand is a postdoctoral researcher at McGill University (2018 - ). He received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 2018. Nikhil is interested in mapping out renormalization group flows between conformal field theories in various dimensions. Currently he is also working on the conformal truncation method and its applications to strongly interacting models in two dimensions and higher.
Gabriel Cuomo
Gabriel Cuomo is a postdoctoral researcher at the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics and Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics in Stony Brook. Before that, he pursued his Ph.D. at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), under the supervision of Professor Riccardo Rattazzi. His work so far mostly focused on the study of the limit of large global quantum numbers in conformal field theories.
Matthijs Hogervorst
Matthijs Hogervorst is a postdoctoral fellow at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). He received his PhD from the École Normale Supérieure in 2015 and subsequently worked at Stony Brook University and Perimeter Institute. Matthijs has studied various questions relevant to the numerical conformal bootstrap, notably the problem of computing conformal blocks. More recently, he developed an analytic approach to the conformal bootstrap based on harmonic analysis. He is presently investigating Hamiltonian truncation methods for both conformal and massive quantum field theories.
Sandipan Kundu
Sandipan Kundu is a postdoctoral researcher at Johns Hopkins University. He completed his PhD in 2014 at the University of Texas at Austin. Thereafter, he joined as a Postdoctoral Associate (2014-2017) at the high energy theory group at Cornell University. Sandipan’s research focuses on the connection between quantum field theory and gravity. Currently, he is interested in understanding causality constraints in conformal field theories by using techniques from conformal bootstrap. He is also working on understanding various aspects of quantum entanglement.
Ying-Hsuan Lin
Ying-Hsuan Lin is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Caltech. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 2016. Ying’s research combines bootstrap with other non-perturbative methods to explore CFTs in 2, 5, and 6 dimensions. His study in 2d is inspired by connections to the string worldsheet and to condensed matter systems, while his work in 5 and 6d aims to elucidate key aspects of M/F-theory via AdS/CFT. Currently, he utilizes topological defects to bootstrap massive phases of 2d systems, and examines various anomalies in 5 and 6d and their interplay with bootstrap data.
Raghu Mahajan
Raghu Mahajan is a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University. He received his PhD from Stanford in 2017. Raghu is interested in formal problems in quantum field theory motivated by transport phenomena, condensed matter physics, and quantum gravity. Currently he is working on extending the analytic bootstrap techniques to CFT correlators at nonzero temperature.
Mario Martone
Mario Martone is a postdoctoral researcher at the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics and Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics in Stony Brook. He obtained his PhD from Cornell University in 2014. He has worked on many topics in theoretical physics, ranging from Quantum Gravity to Phenomenology. His current focus is on mathematical aspects of Quantum Field Theory with the goal of charting the space of four dimensional theories with both Supersymmetry and Conformal Invariance.
Carlo Meneghelli
Carlo Meneghelli is a postdoctoral researcher at the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford. He received is PhD from Humboldt University followed by postdoctoral positions at Fachbereich Mathematik/DESY Theory Group, Hamburg and at the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook University. Carlo's current research focuses on exploring various algebraic structures of superconformal field theories. These include connections with integrable models and chiral algebras.
Marten Reehorst
Marten Reehorst is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHES). He received his PhD from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in 2020. Marten is interested in all aspects of the numerical conformal bootstrap.
Biswajit Sahoo
Biswajit Sahoo is a postdoctoral researcher at Fields and Strings Laboratory (FSL) of École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). He received his PhD from Harish-Chandra Research Institute, India in 2020. Biswajit is interested in all aspects of scattering amplitudes in QFT and quantum gravity. Currently he is working on gravitational S-matrix bootstrap.
Edgar Shaghoulian
Edgar Shaghoulian is a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University. He was previously a postdoctoral researcher at UC Santa Barbara (2014-2017) and received his PhD from Stanford in 2014. Edgar’s research focuses on abstract properties of CFT, with applications to finite-temperature physics and quantum gravity. Currently he is exploring the role played by conformal and higher-form symmetries in gauge/gravity duality, in addition to investigating precise descriptions of quantum cosmology.