Prize Recipient

Jonathan Heckman
Princeton University

"Large R-charged Sectors of the Ads/CFT Correspondence."

While a senior at Princeton University, Heckman’s research centered on the AdS/CFT correspondence – a recent proposal that the physical states of a five dimensional gravitational theory are dual to operators constructed from large matrices of quantum fields in a four dimensional gauge theory. Extending recent work by other researchers, Heckman reconstructed the energy spectra of certain strings on the gravitational side of the correspondence in terms of purely gauge theoretic quantities. Probing other regimes of the correspondence, Heckman also showed that the microstates of small and nearly supersymmetric charged black holes can be reconstructed both from strings in ten dimensions as well as operators in four dimensions. This work is currently being finalized for publication. At Princeton, Heckman received the physics department's Kusaka Memorial Award for undergraduate research and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi. Heckman received his A.B. in physics from Princeton in 2004 and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in theoretical high-energy physics at Harvard University.