About me

My name is Sanjit Shashi. I am a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California's Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics (SCIPP), working primarily with Edgar Shaghoulian.

I graduated from the University of Chicago in 2016 with a bachelor's in math. I then completed my PhD in physics in 2023 at the University of Texas at Austin, under Elena Cáceres and working heavily with Andreas Karch.

Research

For a complete list of my papers, please refer to my page on the inSPIRE database or to my CV.

I primarily study holographic duality or "holography," a mathematical equivalence between theories of quantum gravity and theories describing quantum phenomena with no gravity. Duality is nothing new to physics, with perhaps the most well-known example being the equivalent treatments of light as either a particle or a wave. Gravity is no different, and (in my view) holographic duality is no less profound.

In the past several decades, holography has served as a novel bridge between gravity, condensed-matter physics, and quantum information. It has been and continues to be a valuable framework for studying fundamental questions about the universe. Holography's most prominent application in recent years has been to resolving questions about the physics inside of black holes, a topic with which I have spent much time.

Holography has mostly been formulated in a special type of spacetime called "anti-de Sitter" (AdS). In this context, holography manifests as the so-called AdS/CFT correspondence. "CFT" means "conformal field theory," a particular type of quantum theory with a large amount of symmetry. However, holography should be a generic feature of quantum gravity in any spacetime, and AdS/CFT itself is rather special. A key theme of my current research is going beyond the typical AdS/CFT paradigm, so as to elucidate the universal nature of holography in gravity.

Contact info

Office: Interdisciplinary Sciences Building Room 327, 550 Red Hill Rd, Santa Cruz, CA 95064

Email: sashashi@ucsc.edu