Topics in String Theory

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This award funds the research activities of Professors Eric D'Hoker, Michael Gutperle, and Per Kraus at the University of California, Los Angeles. String theory remains the most promising candidate for the unification of the fundamental forces of nature within a framework consistent with quantum mechanics, the physics of the microscopic world. Developments in string theory over the past few decades have spawned progress in many other fields, and the subject continues to attract and inspire some of the brightest graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in theoretical physics, thereby serving the national interest by promoting the progress of basic scientific research and training the next generation of scientists. The proposed research aims to deepen our understanding of string theory, both through sophisticated calculations at the frontier of string theory and through the exploration of new theoretical ideas associated with possible unexpected behaviors for our universe. This project will also have significant broader impacts. The PI's actively mentor graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. This includes holding group meetings and organizing conferences with other universities in Southern California, the latter serving to introduce junior physicists at UCLA to the broader community of researchers. The PI's are also involved in outreach to the general public, including visiting local elementary, middle, and high schools, and interacting with the students. At a more technical level, Professor D'Hoker plans to advance the subject of superstring perturbation theory, focusing on two-loop amplitudes. Applications include deducing new terms in the low-energy effective action of supergravity, and studying implications for the theory at high energy. Professor Gutperle will investigate aspects of entanglement entropy, including the effects associated with non-local operators and spatial defects, metric structures associated with entanglement, and the concrete calculation of the modular Hamiltonian. Professor Kraus proposes further investigations into higher-spin gravity and its relation to the conformal-block structure of theories with non-linear symmetry algebras. He also plans to continue his study of the structure of black hole microstates.