On July 1, 2018 Professor Cumrun Vafa was officially appointed the Hollis Professor of Mathematicks and Natural Philosophy in the Physics Department at Harvard University. While...

This year, Professor Cumrun Vafa was invited to speak at the World Science Festival on a panel discussion titled "Darkness Visible: Shedding New Light on Black Holes." Moderated by the Chairman of the Board of the World Science Festival and Professor of Physics and Mathematics at Colombia University, Brian Greene, Professor Vafa is introduced to the program at 1:13:00.

Black holes may hold the key to understanding the most fundamental truths of the universe, but how do you see something that’s, well, black? Astronomers think they...

In a classically scale-invariant quantum field theory, tunneling rates are infrared divergent due to the existence of instantons of any size. While one expects such divergences to be resolved by quantum effects, it has been unclear how higher-loop corrections can resolve a problem appearing already at one loop. With a careful power counting, graduate student Anders Andreassen, 2017 Harvard PhD William Frost, and Prof. Matthew Schwartz uncover a series of loop contributions that dominate...

Prof. Subir Sachdev is a recipient of the 2018 Lars Onsager Prize "for his seminal contributions to the theory of quantum phase transitions, quantum magnetism, and fractionalized spin liquids, and for his leadership in the physics community."

The prize was endowed in 1993 by Drs. Russell and Marian Donnelly to recognize outstanding research in theoretical...