Oscar Varela
Physics
Associate Professor
Biography
I am an associate professor of physics at Utah State University. I received my PhD from Valencia University, Spain, and completed postdoctoral research at Imperial College, Max Planck, Utrecht and Harvard. My work lies at the interface of quantum gravity and high energy physics, exploring holographic aspects of the former using string and quantum field theory.
Teaching Interests
I believe that teaching is a key aspect of a scientist’s professional life. As a student, I really enjoyed inspiring lectures from my best teachers and, to a significant extent, these stirring and enthusiastic talks led me to become a scientist myself. Passion for Physics and Mathematics, and eagerness to make students learn are essential features of any good teacher, ones I do have and enthusiastically convey when lecturing.
Ever since I started tutoring classmates at high school and on during undergraduate, I have very much enjoyed the role of teaching and mentoring. During my first degree, I worked one-on-one with several secondary school students, preparing them for their Mathematics and Physics admission exams into university. Later, during graduate school, I served as a TA of Mathematical Methods (MM) for second year Physics undergraduates.
Now at USU I have taught a variety of graduate and undergraduate classes, ranging from Relativity to Quantum Mechanics. While all these classes cover standard material, I always put my courses in the context of current developments on the respective fields. For example, in Quantum Mechanics, besides the usual textbook case of Helium usually employed to illustrate addition of angular momenta, I use the example of a new spin-2 resonance discovered at CERN in 2017. I also speak about new, 2024 Fermilab experimental results on the g-2 factor of the muon and how proposals from strongly-coupled lattice QCD calculations might help in narrowing the big mismatch with the g-2 theoretical prediction.
Research Interests
My area of expertise is high energy theory –more specifically, string theory, supergravity and the AdS/CFT correspondence. My research output has systematically met the highest international standards, it has always been at the forefront of developments in the field, and it has triggered further activity by many other groups. Various of my results have had a significant impact, pushing the state-of-the-art in the field well beyond its limits at the time: 1) the development of new methods to generate Lie algebras from given ones, 2) the establishment of consistent truncations on wide classes of internal spaces, and 3) the construction of one of the first and few known instances of Lifshitz backgrounds in string theory. The latter result has also had an impact away from high energy theory, receiving an on-going number of citations from the condensed matter literature.
More recently, 4) I have elucidated the string theory origin of a new class of dyonic gaugings of supergravity, and 5) have used these results to construct the first explicitly known AdS4 solutions of massive type IIA and provide the first precision test of the AdS/CFT correspondence in massive IIA string theory. I have also 6) derived the Kaluza-Klein fermionic mass matrix from Exceptional Field theory, and have computed the spectrum of some relevant string and M-theory AdS solutions.
Publications | Book Chapters
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Publications | Journal Articles
Academic Journal
Professional Journal
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Publications | Other
Other
An asterisk (*) at the end of a publication indicates that it has not been peer-reviewed.