Faculty

JOHN McGREEVY
Class of 1922 Career Development Associate Professor of Physics

Name: John McGreevy Title(s): Class of 1922 Career Development Associate Professor of Physics Email: mcgreevy@mit.edu Phone: (617) 253-7528 Assistant: Joyce Berggren (617) 253-4827 Address: Massachusetts Institute of Technology 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Bldg. 6-320 Cambridge, MA 02139 Related Links: MIT Center for Theoretical Physics John McGreevy's Home Page Applied String Theory on OCW

Area(s) of Research

Theoretical Physics

Research Interests

The goal of Professor McGreevy's current research is to find physical applications of string theory. There are two, wildly different, ways in which this might happen. One possibility is that string theory will be useful in its capacity as a short-distance completion of models of physics which include gravity. Some areas of inquiry for which such a UV completion is useful are:

• the resolution of singularities and the ability of the topology of spacetime to change;
• models of cosmological inflation;
• mechanisms for supersymmetry breaking and its mediation;
• and many other ideas about physics beyond the Standard Model.

The second possibility arises via holographic duality, an amazing equivalence between string theory in some backgrounds
and ordinary quantum field theories of the kind used to describe many interesting, real physical systems. Through this correspondence, there exists the exciting possibility that results of some laboratory experiments may have a useful description in terms of gravity in extra dimensions.

Biographical Sketch

John McGreevy is from Staten Island, New York. A graduate of Stuyvesant High School and Brown University, he did his thesis work at the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford. Before joining the MIT physics department in July 2006, he was a Dicke Fellow at Princeton and a research scientist at Stanford.

Selected Publications

• "Holographic duality with a view toward many-body physics," J. McGreevy, arXiv:0909.0518.
• "Emergent quantum criticality, Fermi surfaces, and AdS2 ," T. Faulkner, H. Liu, J. McGreevy and D.Vegh, arXiv:0907.2694.
• "Non-Fermi Liquids from Holography," H. Liu, J. McGreevy and D.Vegh, arXiv:0903.2477.
• "Gravity duals for non-relativistic CFTs," K. Balasubramanian and J. McGreevy, arXiv:0804.4053.
• "N-flation," S. Dimopoulos, S. Kachru, J. McGreevy and J. Wacker, arXiv:hep-th/0507205.
• "The Large-N Matrix Harmonic Oscillator as a String Theory," N. Itzhaki and J. McGreevy, arXiv:hep-th/0408180.
• "Strings from Tachyons: the c=1 matrix reloaded," J. McGreevy and H. Verlinde, arXiv:hep-th/0304224.
• "Invasion of the Giant Gravitons from Anti-de Sitter Space," J. McGreevy, L. Susskind and N. Toumbas, arXiv:hep-th/0003075.
• Professor McGreevy's publications can be found on SPIRES.

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