Fernando Alday

Biography

  Fernando received his undergraduate education at Argentina, Instituto Balseiro, obtaining his degree in Physics in 2001. Thereafter, he was awarded his Ph.D. at SISSA, Trieste, Italy, in 2004. In 2010 he joined the University of Oxford and Hertford College, as a University Lecturer in Mathematical Physics. In 2012 he was awarded the title of Professor of Mathematical Physics. Fernando teaches undergraduate tutorials in Applied Mathematics. At the moment Fernando is supervising two DPhil students. One working in the AdS/CFT duality and the other working in super-symmetric Gauge Theories.

Research Interest

  Fernando's research focuses in theoretical high energy physics and string theory. Over the last few years, Fernando studied dualities/equivalences among different theories and pursued two different directions: Direction 1 deals with the so called AdS/CFT duality: a duality, or equivalence, between quantum theories describing fundamental particles and the interactions among them, and gravitational theories, such as the theory describing planetary motion. In 2007, Fernando discovered how to use such duality in order to understand the scattering of elementary particles in terms of a purely geometrical picture. Direction 2 deals with a new duality that relates certain theories of elementary particles (called four-dimensional super-symmetric gauge theories) and certain theories, called Conformal Field Theories, that live in two dimensions. This duality, known in the community as the AGT conjecture (after Alday-Gaiotto-Tachikawa), brought together several branches of Physics and Mathematics, and opened the path to new areas of research.