Petr Hořava (theorist)


Petr Hořava is a Czech string theorist. He is a professor of physics in the Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches courses on quantum field theory and string theory. Hořava is a member of the theory group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Work

Hořava is known for his articles written with Edward Witten about the Hořava-Witten domain walls in M-theory. These articles demonstrated that the ten-dimensional heterotic string theory could be produced from 11-dimensional M-theory by making one of the dimensions have edges. This discovery provided crucial support for the conjecture that all string theories could arise as limits of a single higher-dimensional theory.
Hořava is less well known for his discovery of D-branes, usually attributed to Dai, Leigh and Polchinski, who discovered them independently, also in 1989.
In 2009, Hořava proposed a theory of gravity that separates space from time at high energy while matching some predictions of general relativity at lower energies.