Welcome to Allic Sivaramakrishnan who comes to us as an asssociate research scientist working in Ian Moult’s group. Allic received his undergraduate degree in physics from UC Berkeley and his PhD from UCLA. He held postdoctoral positions at the University of Kentucky and then at Caltech as a Heising-Simons Fellow before joining Yale.
Allic’s research seeks to understand how observables in quantum gravity are defined, computed, and measured in experiment. His work addresses a central challenge in quantum gravity: spacetime fluctuations can invalidate familiar notions of distance, time, and even what it means to perform an experiment. When spacetime fluctuates, then, how do we describe what happens? One aspect of exploring this question involves better understanding correlation functions of observables in effective field theory, which is a framework for describing the low-energy predictions of quantum theories. His work established that several of the properties responsible for groundbreaking advances in scattering amplitudes, including unitarity methods, on-shell kinematics, and color-kinematics duality, in fact extend to correlation functions. Combining these tools with insights from the conformal bootstrap, his work showed that gravitational observables in holographic setups can be easily converted into observables in the dual conformal field theory, which is under far better control. Allic’s more recent research focuses on using these techniques to develop gravitational observables in perturbative quantum gravity and holography. His work has identified a form of elapsed proper time, other geometric observables, and detector observables in quantum gravity. These observables underpin predictions for experiments that probe the interface of quantum mechanics and gravity. Such observables also capture how the onset of quantum gravity effects modifies the laws of nature. This includes testing a widely-conjectured equivalence between quantum information and geometry.