CTP faculty members Netta Engelhardt and Daniel Harlow have been at the vanguard of these developments, which also tie into the research activity of several other CTP faculty members, including Aram Harrow, whose primary research focus is on quantum information, and Hong Liu, whose research connects black holes and quantum many-body dynamics. Moreover these tools have led to substantial progress on the famous black hole information problem, giving new avenues for searching for a resolution of the tension between the physics of black holes and quantum mechanics. It is becoming clear that quantum entanglement, quantum error correction, and computational complexity play a fundamental role in the emergence of spacetime geometry through holographic duality. In recent years a set of new developments has begun to draw unexpected connections between a number of problems relating aspects of gravity, black holes, quantum information, and condensed matter systems. The group in the CTP has close connections to condensed matter physicists, astrophysicists, and mathematicians both at MIT and elsewhere. CTP faculty members work on string theory foundations, the range of solutions of the theory, general relativity and quantum cosmology, problems relating quantum physics to black holes, and the application of holographic methods to strongly coupled field theories. Researchers in the Center for Theoretical Physics (CTP) have been at the forefront of many of the developments in these directions. The interface of quantum physics and gravity is currently leading to exciting new areas of progress, and is expected to remain vibrant in the coming decade. String theory has also led to new insights to problems in many areas of mathematics. These developments and connections have deepened our understanding not only of quantum gravity, cosmology, and particle physics, but also of intermediate scale physics, such as condensed matter systems, the quark-gluon plasma, and disordered systems. In recent years, string theory and quantum field theory have converged in the context of holography, which connects quantum gravity in certain space-times with corresponding (conformal) field theories on a lower-dimensional space-time. Over the last several decades, efforts in this direction have led to a broad range of new physical ideas and mathematical tools. Understanding how these two well-established theories are related remains a central open question in theoretical physics. Quantum physics and Einstein’s theory of general relativity are the two solid pillars that underlie much of modern physics.
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