Daniel Louis Jafferis (born July 23, 1983, in West Haven, Connecticut) is an American theoretical physicist, known for his research on quantum gravity, supersymmetric quantum field theory, and string theory.
Education and career 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.Academic Tree of Cumrun Vafa Jafferis was from 2007 to 2010 a post-doctoral fellow at Rutgers University and from June 2010 to March 2011 a temporary member at the Institute for Advanced Study. He is a tenured professor of physics at Harvard University.
In 2008, Jafferis was, with Ofer Aharony, Oren Bergman, and Juan Maldacena,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 one of the developers of ABJM superconformal field theory, an AdS-CFT correspondence of superconformal (N=6) Chern-Simons theory in three dimensions to M-theory in , described by M2-branes, the solutions of eleven-dimensional supergravity having three-dimensional world-volume – in (four-dimensional anti-DeSitter space).
In 2012, with Silviu Pufu, Benjamin Safdi, 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.Jafferis, Igor Klebanov, S. Pufu, B. Safdi, Towards the F-Theorem: N=2 field theories on the 3-sphere, JHEP 1106:102, 2011, Arxiv
In 2016, with Ping Gao and Aron C. Wall, Jafferis proposed a mechanism for traversable wormholes without exotic matterNatalie Wolchover: Newfound Wormhole Allows Information to Escape Black Holes, Quanta Magazine, October 23, 2017Ping Gao, Daniel Jafferis, Aron C. Wall: Traversable Wormholes via a Double Trace Deformation, JHEP 2017, Arxiv 2016 with a description mathematically equivalent to quantum teleportation.
Awards and honors In 2012 Jafferis received the Henry Primakoff Award of the American Physical Society for "construction and study of three-dimensionals supersymmetric quantum field theories." In 2019 he was awarded the New Horizons in Physics Prize for "fundamental insights about quantum information, quantum field theory, and gravity."
Selected publications
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