Thomas Hertog

Conducted research at

Astroparticule et Cosmologie (APC), Université de Paris 7, Frankrijk

New base of operations

K.U.Leuven, Theoretical Physics Section,
He will conduct research into “Principles and Predictions of a String Theory based Cosmology”.
His Odysseus grant (Group II) amounts to: 711,000 EUR, spread over 5 years. He will co-operate with a team of 3 researchers in Leuven.

Academic career
  • CNRS Research Associate CR1 affiliated at LaboratoireAstroparticule et Cosmologie (APC), University Paris 7 (Paris, France) (2009-present)
  • CNRS Research Associate CR2 affiliated at Laboratoire Astroparticule et Cosmologie (APC), University Paris 7 (Paris, France) (2007-2009)
  • Postdoctoral Fellow at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland (2005-2007)
  • Postdoc at Department of Physics, University of California - campus Santa Barbara (IJCSB), Santa barbara, USA (2002-2005)
Three important publications
  • Gravitational Wave Bursts from Cosmic Superstrings with Y-junctions, P. Binetruy, A. Bohe, T. Hertog, D. Steer, Phys. Rev. D80 (2009) 123510 [arXiv:0907.4522[hep-th]].
  • Towards a Big Crunch Dual, T. Hertog, G.T. Horowitz, JHEP 0407 (2004) 073 [arXiv:hep-th./04061 34].
  • Brane New World, S.W. Hawking, T. Hertog, H.S. Reall, Phys. Rev. P62 (2000) 043501 [arXiv:hep-th/0003052].
From the jury report

Thomas Hertog is an internationally very well known physicist in the field of string theory and cosmology. He has written several very profound and important articles on string cosmology.

So far, the AdS/CFT correspondence was almost entirely used to derive results for gauge theories from gravity. But it would be even more important to use the AdS/CFT correspondence and the holographic principle to get a better understanding about quantum gravity itself. Thomas Hertog was among the first to apply the AdS/CFT correspondence to describe the early universe. In this way he could obtain a holographic description of certain cosmological backgrounds. This is regarded as very innovative and important work.

He also showed how Hartle-Hawking’s ‘no-boundary’ proposal can be used to derive gravity in correlation functions in brain models. In this way he could show that inflation naturally arise in this class of models.

The project is a natural continuation of Thomas Hertog's previous work. It is a very important and challenging problem to get a better understanding about quantum gravity and cosmology in string theory. This project is very promising and can lead to interesting new results.