Petr Hořava (physicist)

Petr Hořava (born 1963 in Prostějov)^[1] is a Czech string theorist. He is a professor of physics in the Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches courses on quantum field theory and string theory. Hořava is a member of the theory group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Work

Hořava is known for his articles written with Edward Witten about the Hořava-Witten domain walls in M-theory. These articles demonstrated that the ten-dimensional heterotic ${\displaystyle E_{8}\times E_{8}}$ string theory could be produced from 11-dimensional M-theory by making one of the dimensions have edges (the domain walls). This discovery provided crucial support for the conjecture that all string theories could arise as limits of a single higher-dimensional theory.

Hořava is less well known for his discovery of D-branes, usually attributed to Dai, Leigh and Polchinski, who discovered them independently, also in 1989.^[2]

In 2009, Hořava proposed a theory of gravity that separates space from time at high energy while matching some predictions of general relativity at lower energies.^[3][4]

See also

• Hořava–Lifshitz gravity
• Hořava–Witten domain wall
• K-theory (physics)

References

1. Profile at Grant Fund Neuron website
2. Hořava, Petr (1989). "Background duality of open-string models". Physics Letters B. 231 (3): 251–257. Bibcode:1989PhLB..231..251H. doi:10.1016/0370-2693(89)90209-8.
3. Hořava, Petr (2009). "Quantum gravity at a Lifshitz point". Physical Review D. 79 (8): 084008. arXiv:0901.3775. Bibcode:2009PhRvD..79h4008H. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.79.084008. S2CID 891685.
4. Zeeya Merali, "Splitting Time from Space—New Quantum Theory Topples Einstein's Spacetime", Scientific American (Dec. 2009).

External links

• Hořava's webpage at LBNL