Highlights of the Mani L. Bhaumik Institute for Theoretical Physics at UCLA
The Mani L. Bhaumik Institute for Theoretical Physics at UCLA, founded in 2016, is an endowed institute within the Department of Physics and Astronomy. Established through the generosity of Dr. Mani L. Bhaumik, the Institute is dedicated to fostering an exceptional research environment where faculty, postdoctoral researchers, and graduate students thrive. It focuses primarily on quantum field theory, unification, and fundamental issues in quantum theory, provides funding for postdocs, graduate students, and visitors and hosts a distinguished lecture series and periodic workshops. The Institute has been enormously beneficial to its academic community. Notably, all postdoctoral fellows who departed the Institute in the past two years have secured outstanding positions. Of the nine postdocs, six advanced to prestigious postdoctoral appointments at other high-level institutions, while three were offered junior faculty positions.
A few highlights from various Institute members are as follows:
Professor Zvi Bern
Prof. Zvi Bern has been at the forefront of advancing precision techniques in gravitational-wave theory using quantum scattering amplitude methods. His recent work includes groundbreaking contributions to understanding spin in general relativity and exploring “double-copy” relations, which gives a unified approach to gravity theories and gauge theories such as quantum electrodynamics and quantum chromodynamics, which underlies strong nuclear force. In collaboration with current and former UCLA postdocs Enrico Herrmann, Michael Ruf, and Mao Zeng, and a colleague, Radu Roiban (Penn State), Prof. Bern recently achieved a breakthrough in resolving a long-standing issue in the double-copy framework. This progress opens new avenues for investigating the quantum properties of supergravity theories. Prof. Bern’s review article, titled “The duality between color and kinematics and its applications,” co-authored with Marco Chiodaroli (Uppsala), John Joseph Carrasco (Northwestern), Henrik Johansson (Uppsala), and Radu Roiban (Penn State), won a 2024 Frontiers of Science Best Paper Award from the International Congress of Basic Science. Notably, Marco, John Joseph, and Henrik are all former UCLA graduate students. This marks Professor Bern’s second consecutive win of this award. In 2023, he and Prof. Mikhail Solon, also an Institute member, received the honor for their paper applying quantum scattering amplitude methods to gravitational-wave theory. Prof. Bern will be awarded the 2024 Niels Bohr Institute Medal of Honor at a June 11, 2025 ceremony in Copenhagen, Denmark. In 2023, he was awarded the Galilei Galileo Medal by the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN), alongside his long-time collaborators Lance Dixon (Stanford) and David Kosower (Saclay, France), in recognition of their pioneering work on quantum scattering amplitudes. Additionally, in 2024, he was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, which is considered one of the highest honors a scientist can achieve. Prof. Bern is also a principal investigator on a newly awarded €12 million European Research Council Synergy Grant, collaborating with European colleagues Alessandra Buonanno (AEI, Potsdam), Maarten van de Meent (Niels Bohr Institute), and Enrico Barausse (SISSA, Italy). Approximately one-fourth of the grant’s funding is allocated to the Bhaumik Institute. This project aims to enhance the precision of gravitational-wave theory by two orders of magnitude to align with the experimental precision of next-generation gravitational wave detectors. The Bhaumik Institute portion of the grant will be managed jointly with Prof. Solon.
Professor Eric D’Hoker
Prof. Eric D’Hoker, in collaboration with Oliver Schlotterer and Martijn Hidding of Uppsala University, has been developing a novel mathematical framework for the investigation of superstring scattering amplitudes, with potential applications to gravity and gauge amplitudes. In particular, they reduced the major bottleneck of spin structure summations to a more tractable problem in modular forms and cast the result in terms of polylogarithms on higher-genus Riemann surfaces, which they developed along the way. In collaboration with graduate student Sriram Bharadwaj, Prof. D’Hoker investigated the relatively poorly understood but physically exciting Argyres-Douglas superconformal Yang-Mills theories. These theories contain massless particles with electric and magnetic charges that are mutually non-local and defy standard quantum field theory methods. Using small mass deformations, the authors developed a reliable quantitative approach to studying these theories. Finally, Prof. D’Hoker finished a book project in collaboration with Justin Kaidi (who obtained his PhD from UCLA in 2020 and is currently a junior faculty member at the University of Washington in Seattle), a project that grew out of a graduate course D’Hoker taught in 2017. The book, entitled Modular Forms and String Theory, is being published by Cambridge University Press. Its subject is the unification of concepts and methods common to string theory (an extension of quantum field theory in Physics) and to the theory of modular forms (a key ingredient in Andrew Wiles’s proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem in Mathematics).
Professor Mikhail Solon
Prof. Mikhail Solon applies quantum field theory tools, such as effective field theory and scattering amplitudes, to new areas such as black holes and gravitational waves. He has previously applied these tools towards understanding various aspects of heavy quarks, dark matter, and cosmological large scale structure. With UCLA graduate student Mishary Alrashed and former graduate student Dimitrios Kosmopoulos (University of Geneva), he has been fusing ideas from general relativity and scattering amplitudes to develop new tools for analyzing so-called extreme mass ratio binary inspirals, which are orbits of light compact objects about supermassive black holes. With graduate student Anna Wolz, he has developed new methods for modeling three-body systems in general relativity, focusing on the astrophysically relevant case of hierarchical triples. With graduate student Noah Moran and postdocs Enrico Herrmann and Nic Pavao, he has been developing a new scalable tool for reducing the number of Feynman integrals in high-precision calculations in quantum field theory, which is the main bottleneck in state-of-the-art calculations. With UCLA postdoc Giulia Isabella, and collaborators Simon Caron-Huot and Miguel Correia (McGill), he has been using scattering amplitudes to gain a new understanding of the tidal deformation of black holes in external gravitational fields. In 2023, he won a Frontiers of Science Best Paper Award from the International Congress of Basic Science for two papers applying effective field theory and scattering amplitude methods to gravitational-wave emission from inspiraling binary black holes. Prof. Mikhail Solon was also awarded a US Department of Energy Early Career Award in 2023, a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2022, and a Hellmann Fellowship in 2023. Notably, Prof. Thomas Dumitrescu, also won both the Hellmann and Department of Energy Early Career Award five years earlier. These highly competitive awards help jump-start the careers of the most promising young faculty.