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Name
Cumrun VAFA
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| Job Title |
| Donor Professor of Science, Harvard University. |
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| Biography |
| Cumrun Vafa was born in 1960 in Tehran, Iran. He came to the US in 1977 to continue his education. He received a BS degree in Mathematics and in Physics in 1981 from MIT, and a PhD in Physics from Princeton University in 1985. In 1985, he joined the Harvard Society of Fellows, became a junior faculty member at Harvard in 1988 and has been a professor of physics at Harvard University since 1990. |
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| Field of Study |
Cumrun Vafa's research area is theoretical high-energy physics with emphasis on such fundamental questions as the nature of quantum gravity and the relation between geometry and quantum field theories. String theory has emerged as a strong candidate for a unified description of gravity and other forces. The recent discovery of duality symmetries (generalizing electric/magnetic exchange symmetry in Maxwell theory) in string theory has led to a significant insight into non-perturbative dynamics of gravity and quantum field theories. Among these one can name the discovery of Strominger and Vafa that the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy of a black hole can be accounted for by solitonic states of string theory and also the relation between geometry and field theories that arise through string dualities, a topic known as "geometric engineering of quantum field theories".
Vafa's main interest now is to understand the underlying meaning of string dualities, as well as trying to apply string theory to some unsolved questions of particle physics such as the hierarchy problem and the cosmological constant problem. |
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