Photo Credit: Sreejith Nair

Current Research:                 

Holography and AdS/CFT: One of the most interesting theoretical developments in the last few decades in theoretical high energy physics is the discovery of AdS/CFT (Anti-de Sitter/Conformal Field theory) correspondence, also known as the Holography. It is a duality between a strongly coupled quantum field theory and a weakly coupled gravity theory. Besides providing critical insight into the nature of quantum gravity, it provides an alternative way to study quantum field theory in regimes where the usual perturbative tools do not apply. Still, the proper understanding of the inner-workings of Holography eludes us. In recent times, key insights from quantum information theory have helped us shed some important light on the inner-workings of AdS/CFT. Our group at IIT Gandhinagar uses tools of quantum information theory to study several aspects of AdS/CFT and quantum gravity.

Scattering Amplitudes/EFT in Gravitational waves: Recent developments in scattering amplitudes, effective field theory have given new insights into the classical two-body dynamics in the post-Minkowskian (PM) expansion and post-Newtonian (PN), leveraging extremely efficient computational techniques traditionally used for collider physics.Our group at IIT-Gandhinagar uses multiloop amplitude techniques to deal with such scattering and inspiral event.

Gravitational Waves/Black Hole Perturbation Theories/EMRIs: The ongoing advancements in Black Hole Perturbation Theory (BHPT) play a crucial role for analyzing gravitational waves, testing general relativity, advancing astrophysical understanding, and assessing parameters for their detectability. Our research group uses BHPT to examine black hole binaries, particularly extreme mass-ratio inspirals (EMRIs) and explores the potential role of Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) observations in constraining various measurable quantities.

Lower Dimensional Topological Field Theories: 2D JT gravity , 3D gravity on hyperbolic manifolds has got a renewed interest to understand the 4D Quantum gravity. The Chern-Simmons prescription to 3D gravity has been a long standing duality. Focusing on current developments of Teichmuller quantization, Pure 3D gravity phase is dual to two copies of Teichmuller theory. The states on the bulk AdS_3 has a dual description in terms of 2D Liouville conformal blocks . Our group focuses on  this topic to extend it more to familiarize the deep subtleties involved and to better understand the 4D Quantum gravity theories which is still a big treasure.