Nag Lecture 2015



Shiraz Minwalla is a professor of theoretical physics at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai.

He obtained his Ph. D at Princeton University under the guidance of Prof. Nathan Seiberg. After his Ph.D he was a Harvard Junior Fellow and subsequently an Assistant Professor at Harvard University.

Prof. Minwalla was awarded the Swarnajayanti Fellowship 2005-06 by the Department of Science & Technology, Government of India. He was awarded the ICTP Prize in 2010 and the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, the highest science award in India, in the physical sciences category in 2011. He was awarded the Infosys Prize 2013 in the field of Physical Sciences by the Infosys Science Foundation. He was awarded the 2014 New Horizons in Physics Prize by theFundamental Physics Prize for "his pioneering contributions to the study of string theory and quantum field theory; and in particular his work on the connection between the equations of fluid dynamics and Albert Einstein's equations of general relativity."

Public Lecture

Friday 13th November 2015 at 3.30hrs

String Theory and the Gauge Gravity Correspondence

I will explain what a quantum theory of gravity is and why we need one. I then proceed to describe the satisfactory construction of one specially symmetric quantum theory of gravity. The quantization I describe is simply the gauge gravity (or AdS/CFT) correspondence of string theory.

Technical talks

Effective Theories of Horizons

The classical dynamics of space times with event horizons is often of great interest - but in general is very complicated. We will demonstrate that event horizon dynamics simplifies in the limit of a large number of dimensions. In this limit event horizon dynamics is governed by the equations of a dynamical membrane that hosts a velocity and charge density field. At leading order in the large D expansion we determine the effective equations of membrane dynamics. We discuss possible applications of our construction.