Instituto Balseiro, on which Maldacena obtained his Physics licenciatura
Maldacena obtained his licenciatura (a six-year degree) in 1991 at the
Instituto Balseiro,
Bariloche, Argentina, under the supervision of Gerardo Aldazábal. He then obtained his Ph.D. in physics at
Princeton University after completing a doctoral dissertation titled "Black holes in string theory" under the supervision of
Curtis Callan in 1996, and went on to a post-doctoral position at
Rutgers University. In 1997, he joined
Harvard University as associate professor, being quickly promoted to Professor of Physics in 1999. Since 2001 he has been a professor at the
Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton, New Jersey and in 2016 became the first Carl P. Feinberg Professor of Theoretical Physics in the institute's School of Natural Sciences.
Contributions to physics
Maldacena has made numerous discoveries in theoretical physics.
Leonard Susskind called him "perhaps the greatest physicist of his generation... certainly the greatest theoretical physicist of his generation".[4] His most famous discovery is the most reliable realization of the
holographic principle – namely the
AdS/CFT correspondence, a conjecture about the equivalence of
string theory on
Anti-de Sitter (AdS) space, and a
conformal field theory defined on the boundary of the AdS space.[5] According to the conjecture, certain theories of quantum gravity are equivalent to other quantum mechanical theories (with no gravitational force) in one fewer spacetime dimensions.
In subsequent works, Maldacena elucidated several aspects of the AdS/CFT correspondence, describing how certain physical observables defined in one theory can be described in the equivalent theory. Shortly after his original work on the AdS/CFT correspondence, Maldacena showed how
Wilson lines can be computed in a corresponding string theory by considering the area swept by an evolving fundamental string.[6] Wilson lines are non-local physical observables defined in
gauge theory. In 2001, Maldacena proposed that an eternal
black hole, an object defined in a gravitational theory, is equivalent to a certain
entangled state involving two copies of the corresponding quantum mechanical theory.[7] Ordinary black holes emit
Hawking radiation and eventually evaporate. An eternal black hole is a type of black hole that survives forever because it eventually re-absorbs the radiation it emits.