Andrew K. Waldron
Home page:
http://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~wally/
Position: Associate Professor
Year joining UC Davis: 2000
Degree: Ph.D.(in Physics), 1997, State University of New York at Stony Brook
Refereed publications: Via
Math Reviews
Recent publications: Via
math arXiv
Professor Andrew Waldron's research is devoted to a broad range of problems in
theoretical and mathematical physics. In particular he has made an important
contribution to the conjectured Banks-Fishler-Shenker-Susskind (BFSS) matrix
model of string theory and M-theory. String theory is a proposed perturbative
theory that would unify all of the fundamental forces of physics; in other
words it is a "theory of everything". Its non-perturbative counterpart is a
hypothetical theory called M-theory. One part of the BFSS conjecture relates
the scattering of bound states to scattering of supergravitons.
(Eleven-dimensional supergravity is a known low-energy limit of M-theory.)
This relation has been verified in many cases; the strongest results in this
direction belong to Professor Waldron [1] [3].
Professor Waldron has also studied other problems arising in M-theory and in
supergravity. In particular, he analyzed higher spin fields on a special
model universe called anti-de-Sitter space. These results are relevant to the
AdS/CFT conjecture in M-theory, which asserts that supergravity on
anti-de-Sitter space is equivalent to conformal field theory on its boundary
[5]. Several other articles by Professor Waldron are devoted to the theory of
spinors and of operators acting on spinor fields. For example, he calculated
the index of non-standard Dirac operators [2]. This result in the vein of the
celebrated Atiyah-Singer index theorem, which was one of the first connections
between quantum field theory and goemetric topology.
Selected publications
[1] The Matrix Theory S-matrix (with J. C. Plefka and M. Serone),
Phys. Rev. Lett. 81 (1998), 2866-2869, arXiv:hep-th/9806081.
[2] An index theorem for non-standard Dirac operators
(with J.-W. van Holten and K. Peeters),
Class. Quant. Grav. 16 (1999), 2537-2544, arXiv:hep-th/9901163.
[3] Three graviton scattering in M-Theory
(with R. Helling, J. Plefka, and M. Serone),
Nucl. Phys. B559 (1999), 184-204, arXiv:hep-th/9905183.
[4] R^4 couplings, the fundamental membrane and exceptional
theta correspondences (with B. Pioline, H. Nicolai, and J. Plefka),
JHEP 0103 (2001), 036, arXiv:hep-th/0102123.
[5] Null propagation of partially massless higher spins in (A)dS and
cosmological constant speculations (with S. Deser), arXiv:hep-th/0105181.
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