Eric Perlmutter, physicist
CEA Research Director at IHES
Eric Perlmutter works on understanding the space and properties of conformal field theories in diverse dimensions, and their profound connections to quantum gravity via the AdS/CFT Correspondence.
After having received his Ph.D. in physics from UCLA and held postdoctoral positions at the University of Cambridge, Princeton University, and Caltech, Eric Perlmutter became a permanent researcher in the String Theory Group of the Institut de Physique Theorique (IPhT), CEA Saclay.
His current work focuses on aspects of conformal field theories with many degrees of freedom, the symmetries thereof, and what they imply about the existence of simple theories of gravity. This involves ideas from the spectral theory of the modular group, as well as generalizations of random matrix universality realized by conformal field theories. One overarching goal of this research is to give a microscopic accounting of the chaotic dynamics of black holes.
ERC Starting Grant, “Scattering Strings and Other Things: A Modern Approach to Quantum Gravity and the Conformal Bootstrap” (2020)