Gary T. Horowitz (born April 14, 1955 inWashington, D.C.) is an American theoretical physicist who works onstring theory andquantum gravity.
Horowitz studied atPrinceton University (Bachelor 1976) and obtained his Ph.D. in 1979 at theUniversity of Chicago withRobert Geroch. Subsequently, he was a post-doc at theUniversity of California, Santa Barbara andOxford University (as a NATO Fellow). In 1981-1983 he worked as an Einstein Fellow at theInstitute for Advanced Study. He became an assistant professor in 1983, associate professor in 1986, and finally professor in 1990 at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Horowitz investigates gravitational phenomena, such as black holes, in string theory. In the 1990s, he worked with, among others,Andrew Strominger[1] andJoseph Polchinski showing that string theory provides a description of the quantum microstates of certain black holes (following earlier work of Strominger andCumrun Vafa).[2]
In 1985 Horowitz published an influential paper withPhilip Candelas,Andrew Strominger andEdward Witten on the compactification of superstrings in Calabi-Yau spaces.[3] In the early 1990s, Horowitz and Strominger found blackbrane solutions in string theory.[4] Horowitz also works on theAdS/CFT correspondence and (together with Sean Hartnoll and Chris Herzog) discovered holographicsuperconductors.[5]
In 1982 Horowitz and M. Perry won first prize in the Gravity Research Foundation essay competition. From 1985 to 1989 he was a Sloan Fellow. In 1993 he was awarded the Xanthopoulos Prize. He has been aFellow of the American Physical Society since 2001,[6] Member of theNational Academy of Sciences since 2010, andFellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2013.
