Dr Sameer Murthy joins Department of Mathematics

Sameer Murthy graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, and got his PhD at Princeton University under the supervision of Nathan Seiberg. He subsequently held a research position at the Abdus Salam ICTP Trieste, a Marie Curie fellowship at the University of Paris, and a senior post-doctoral research position at Nikhef Amsterdam where he was awarded the NWO VIDI research grant by the Dutch organization for scientific research.  In September 2013 he moved to King's College London as a Lecturer in Theoretical Physics.

Sameer's research interests lie in quantum field theory, string theory, and mathematical physics. He has worked on quantum aspects of black holes, the non-perturbative spectrum of states in string theory, non-rational conformal field theories in two dimensions, holographic duals to N=1 supersymmetric gauge theories, matrix models of two-dimensional gravity, and supersymmetry breaking in string theory.

In the last few years his research has focussed on aspects of black holes in string theory and their intriguing thermodynamic behaviour. The thermodynamic entropy of black holes can be explained in string theory at a more fundamental level by viewing the black hole as an ensemble of microscopic excitations of strings and branes. Sameer's research along with his collaborators pushes this understanding beyond the semi-classical picture to take into account quantum effects in the black hole. His research show how quantum corrections to the entropy of supersymmetric black holes can be summed up using techniques of localization. These calculations explain the intricate manner in which quantum corrections in the continuum theory of gravity are arranged so as to add up to an exact integer, which in turn provides an important clue about the quantization of gravity.

On another front, his research deals with the fascinating relations between string theory and the theory of numbers. Along with his collaborators, he uncovered novel relations between black holes in string theory and the theory of automorphic forms, and in particular, a newly-formulated class of functions called mock modular forms.  A popular article entitled The Black Hole Connection discusses this topic. This discovery leads to, on one hand, applications of the techniques of analytic number theory to solve detailed questions about black hole physics, and on the other, generates many new examples of mock modular forms (that have been rare so far). Sameer is currently interested in working out these connections in depth. As part of this web of connections, he is also interested in a mysterious relation to finite groups, dubbed "Mathieu moonshine".