Samir Dayal Mathur is a theoretical physicist who specializes in

string theory In physics, string theory is a theoretical framework in which the point-like particles of particle physics are replaced by one-dimensional objects called strings. String theory describes how these strings propagate through space and interac ...

and

black hole A black hole is a region of spacetime where gravitation, gravity is so strong that nothing, including light or other Electromagnetic radiation, electromagnetic waves, has enough energy to escape it. The theory of general relativity predicts t ...

physics. Mathur is a professor in the Department of Physics at

Ohio State University The Ohio State University, commonly called Ohio State or OSU, is a public land-grant research university in Columbus, Ohio. A member of the University System of Ohio, it has been ranked by major institutional rankings among the best publ ...

and a member of the University's High Energy Theory Group. He was a faculty member at

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

from 1991–99 and held postdoctoral positions at

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. Mathur's research is focused on string theory, black holes, the

AdS/CFT In theoretical physics, the anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory correspondence, sometimes called Maldacena duality or gauge/gravity duality, is a conjectured relationship between two kinds of physical theories. On one side are anti-de Sitter s ...

correspondence, and

cosmology Cosmology () is a branch of physics and metaphysics dealing with the nature of the universe. The term ''cosmology'' was first used in English in 1656 in Thomas Blount (lexicographer), Thomas Blount's ''Glossographia'', and in 1731 taken up in ...

. He is best known for developing the

Fuzzball Fuzzball may refer to: * Fuzzball (sport), a variation of baseball similar to stickball * Fuzzball (string theory), an alternative quantum description of black holes * Fuzzball router, the first modern routers on the Internet * ''Fuzzball'', a car ...

conjecture as a resolution of the black hole information paradox. The Fuzzball conjecture asserts that the fundamental description of black holes is given by a

quantum In physics, a quantum (plural quanta) is the minimum amount of any physical entity (physical property) involved in an interaction. The fundamental notion that a physical property can be "quantized" is referred to as "the hypothesis of quantizati ...

bound state of matter which has the same size as the corresponding classical black hole. This quantum bound state replaces the event horizon and singularity, and the classical black hole metric is claimed to be an approximate effective description. In 2009 Mathur published a strong version of the black hole information paradox, strengthening Stephen Hawking's original version by demonstrating that small local corrections to Hawking's semiclassical analysis cannot restore

unitarity In quantum physics, unitarity is the condition that the time evolution of a quantum state according to the Schrödinger equation is mathematically represented by a unitary operator. This is typically taken as an axiom or basic postulate of quantu ...

. This result was obtained by applying Strong Subadditivity of Quantum Entropy to the evaporation of Hawking radiation. This led to a renewed interest in the information paradox and the development of the 2012 black hole firewall paradox.

References

External links

Mathur's web page at The Ohio State University

List of Publications on INSPIRE-HEP

— by The Ohio State University
KITP Seminar: The Black Hole Story in 4 Steps , Samir Mathur
Living people 20th-century Indian physicists Ohio State University faculty Indian string theorists Year of birth missing (living people) MIT Center for Theoretical Physics faculty {{physicist-stub