Nick Chakraborty, 3rd year math PhD student at Stony Brook

Interests: general relativity, AdS/CFT (+ quantum field theory/strings in general), geometric analysis

Contact me: nikhil.chakraborty@stonybrook.edu

Advisor: Marcus Khuri

Pedagogical Notes

Disclaimer: These notes reflect my understanding of these topics, which still needs quite a bit of work. I presented some of this stuff in our Student Mathematical Physics Seminar (which I organized), and our Advanced Graduate Theory Seminar.

Physics

Introduction to quantum field theory, momentum space Feynman rules (supplement). Mostly basic perturbation theory with scalars and no gauge symmetry. Main source: Peskin and Schroeder.

Hawking radiation on a Vaidya spacetime. This derivation does not discuss the universality of the radiation spectrum -- it just provides a specific example. Source: this paper; I just wrote out the calculations in some more detail.

Stringy black holes

Some perspectives on apparent horizons

Math

Jang equation and positive mass theorem (following Schoen-Yau '81)

Supersymmetry, mass, and the BPS condition (starting with Witten '81)

In-Between

Mass functionals in GR

Seiberg-Witten geometry and N = 2 SUSY

Calabi-Yau compactifications (heterotic strings, then Type IIA/IIB strings)