2024 Hirosi Ooguri

2024 Ta-You Wu Lecture
in Physics

Professor Hirosi Ooguri (California Institute of Technology and University of Tokyo)

VIEW THE LECTURE ON YOUTUBE

Constraints on Quantum Gravity

Superstring theory is currently the best candidate for the ultimate unification of general relativity and quantum mechanics. Although predictions of the theory are typically made at extremely high energies and beyond the reach of current experiments and observations, several non-trivial constraints have recently been found on its low-energy effective theory. Because of the unusual ultraviolet behavior of gravitational theory, the standard argument for the separation of scales does not work for gravity, leading to robust low-energy predictions of consistency requirements at high energy. For gravitational theories in asymptotically anti-de Sitter spacetimes, we can formulate such constraints and aim to prove or falsify them using the AdS/CFT correspondence. I will review recent progress in this approach and discuss examples of such constraints and their implications for low energy physics.

Location: Rackham Amphitheatre (4th Floor)
University of Michigan Ann Arbor Campus
Seating Begins at 2:30 PM!

This was a hybrid lecture.

Biography
Hirosi Ooguri is the Fred Kavli Professor and Director of the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and a University Professor at the University of Tokyo. He explores mathematical structures in quantum field theory, quantum gravity, and string theory, and uses them to develop theoretical tools for solving fundamental questions in physics.

After completing his graduate studies in two years, Ooguri became a tenured faculty member at the University of Tokyo in 1986. He was on the faculties at the University of Chicago, Kyoto University, and the University of California at Berkeley before joining Caltech in 2000. He has also served as President of the Aspen Center for Physics and, until this summer, as Chair of its Board of Trustees.

Ooguri has received the Eisenbud Prize for Mathematics and Physics from the American Mathematical Society, the Simons Investigator Award and the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Humboldt Award and the Hamburg Prize in Germany, and the Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon from the Emperor of Japan. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Mathematical Society.

Ooguri's popular science books have sold over 300,000 copies in Japan, and one of them won the Kodansha Prize for Science Books. He also supervised a science movie, which was selected for the Best Educational Production Award from the International Planetarium Society and has been translated into six languages.