Awards:
Physics Professor Leopoldo Pando Zayas Receives UROP’s Outstanding Research Mentor Award
Physics Professor Leopoldo Pando Zayas has been selected to receive an Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) Outstanding Research Mentor Award from the University of Michigan. Professor Pando Zayas is one of only six UROP sponsors to receive this award. This distinction recognizes Professor Pando Zayas’ contributions to the mentorship and development of young scholars and researchers. The nomination speaks to the importance of such mentorship, not only in a student’s academic pursuits but also in helping them identify future academic and career goals.
Winner of Honorable Mentions in the Gravity Research Foundation Essay Competition
Mention Essays for 2014
The black hole information loss paradox epitomizes the contradictions between general relativity and quantum field theory. The AdS/CFT correspondence provides an implicit answer for the information loss paradox in black hole physics by equating a gravity theory with an explicitly unitary field theory. Gravitational collapse in asymptotically AdS spacetimes is generically turbulent. Given that the mechanism to read out the information about correlation functions in the field theory side is plagued by deterministic classical chaos, we argue that quantum chaos might provide the true Rosetta Stone for answering the information paradox in the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence.
Mention Essays for 2012
Due to the AdS/CFT correspondence the questions of instability of Anti-de-Sitter spacetimes sits in the intersection of mathematical and numerical relativity, string theory, field theory and condensed matter physics, In this essay we revisit that important question emphasizing the power of spectral methods and highlighting the effectiveness of standard techniques for studying non-linear dynamical systems. In particular, we display explicitly how the problem can be modeled as a system of nonlinearly coupled harmonic oscillators. We highlight some of the many open questions that stem from this result and point out that a full understanding will necessarily require the interdisciplinary cooperation of various communities.
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