Email: pchesler@mit.edu Phone: 617-253-7031 Address: Department of Physics MIT Building 6C-403 77 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02139 Related Links: 2009-12 Pappalardo Fellows in Physics Area of Physics: Nuclear and Particle Theory

Research Interests

Paul Chesler's research interests lie primarily in the fields of particle, nuclear and gravitational physics.  Much of his research has focused on non-equilibrium phenomena in quantum field theory and its exploration via gauge/gravity duality.  

One facet of gauge/gravity duality which Chesler is interested in is the fluid/gravity correspondence, which relates the classical evolution of black holes in D+1 spacetime dimensions to the quantum dynamics of strongly coupled fluids in D spacetime dimensions.  Chesler is interested in applying lessons and techniques from general relativity to problems within gauge/gravity duality in order to study aspects of fluid dynamics and far-from-equilibrium processes in high energy physics.  

Chesler is also interested in holographic descriptions of various phenomena in condensed matter physics, such as superconductivity and superfluidity. 

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Biographical Sketch

Paul Chesler receive his Ph.D in the summer of 2009 under the supervision of Laurence Yaffe. He obtained his undergraduate degree in mathematics and physics from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2003.

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Selected Publications

P.M. Chesler and A. Vuorinen, "Heavy flavor diffusion in weakly coupled N = 4 super Yang-Mills theory," JHEP 0611, 037 (2006) [arXiv:hep-ph/0607148].

P.M. Chesler and L.G. Yaffe, "The wake of a quark moving through a strongly-coupled
N = 4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills plasma," Phys. Rev. Lett. 99, 152001 (2007) [arXiv:0706.0368[hep-th]].

P.M. Chesler and L.G. Yaffe, "The stress-energy tensor of a quark moving through a strongly-coupled N = 4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills plasma: comparing hydrodynamics and AdS/CFT," Phys. Rev. D 78, 045013 (2008) [arXiv:0712.0050 [hep-th]].

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