My research interests are mainly concerned with the development of theoretical tools for the description of the basic fabric of Nature. The tools and ideas often have applications in other areas of physics (and mathematics) too - unexpected connections are part of the fun of research!
Ultimately we (i.e., the international
community of which I am a part) are trying to understand and describe
the origin, past, present and future of the Universe. This requires a
description of its fundamental
constituents (and their interactions) and of the Universe itself as a
dynamical physical object.
I am part of the high energy theoretical physics
group at the University of Southern California.
I mainly work on (super)string theory, gravity, gauge theory and M-theory right now, which lead me to think about things like space-time, quantum mechanics, black holes, the big bang, extra dimensions, quarks, gluons, and so forth.
I blog about research matters from time to time (among other things) and so you can get a feel for some of the things I do by reading some of the posts there. Look under the "research" category, for example. For some insight into the day-to-day aspects with a week's worth of "day in the life" snapshots, try this series of posts: Notes From the Day, Not All Noteworthy, Notes From Stealth Mode, Thursday Notes, End Notes.
For more that, which might give you some insight into modes of thought that we use, try these: Nuts and Bolts, Consider a Spherical...
I should mention my book on D-branes!
Follow the link for more detailed information.
Publications
You can see the most up-to-date list of my publications in high energy physics by clicking here (from the SLAC database). There's a (not regularly updated) list here, which covers my research interests from 1989.
Some online talks (this is horribly incomplete -sorry)
In June of 2005 I gave five lectures on String Theory (introductory) at CERN (Geneva), and you can find video of that here. Oddly enough, that same month I gave some lectures on strings at Perimeter (Waterloo, Canada) as part of the Summer School entitled Strings, Gravity & Cosmology. I think that those lectures are much better (I'm less jet-lagged, for a start), and you can stream them from Perimeter's site, by following the trail of links that seems to begin here.
I spoke at the conference "Modern Challenges for Lattice Field Theory" in March 2005, telling the Latice Field Theory community about aspects of the AdS/CFT correspondence, and how recent developments might be useful in the study of QCD. The talk was called "AdS/CFT: Past, Present, and Future?" and the audio, video and slides are here.
Here is my plenary talk entitled "Current Trends in String Theory", which I was asked to give at the American Physical Society's DPF 2004 meeting. They wanted a cosmological emphasis, so that was my focus.
There was an excellent workshop at KIAS
in Korea in May 2002. I gave a talk on holographic RG flows, and
also a new
pp-wave solution and its field theory dual. This is archived here.
I
talked about the "enhancon" at the ITP M-Theory workshop sometime back
in 2001.
You can listen to that and see it here.
In December of 2000, I gave a series of
talks
in Korea on D-Brane Probe techniuqes. There is audio and a whole bunch
of
slides here.
My Strings
2000 talk at Michigan, together with a spectacularly bad photograph
of me in full sail. Actually, I'd rather you read the official talk
write-up in the conference proceedings (to appear) or the paper it is based on,
since I say some factually incorrect things in that talk.
Have a look here at one of my talks on the
amazing thermodynamic phase structure of charged black holes in anti de
Sitter space, and what it has to do with the``holographic
principle''.... (It was given (for example), at the ITP (UCSB) and
Caltech in March 1999.)
Here are the (pdf)
transparencies of the inaugural presentation which I gave at the
amusingly named ``EFIITS'' (Enrico Fermi Institute
Interdisciplinary Theory series) in Chicago. (I will improve this later
with internal hyperlinks...)
This other talk
was given (among other places) on 15th October at the Center for
Geometry and Theoretical Physics at Duke) (video
stream....and transparencies.)
See hyperlinked copies of the transparencies
of my talk about
String theory and Field theory Dualities, given at the Rutherford
Meeting in December '97.
See the talk
which
I presented at Strings `96,
complete with copies of my transparencies.
Career
If you really have nothing better to do, you
may have a look at a stripped - down version of my curriculum
vitae.