Matthias Gaberdiel

string theory, conformal field theory

Matthias (Reinhard) Gaberdiel has been Full Professor at ETH Zurich since April 2007 (Associate Professor of Theoretical Physics since July 2003). His main interests are string theory and conformal field theory.

Prof. Gaberdiel was born on 25. June 1966 in Offenburg (Germany). He studied at the "Freien Universitaet Berlin" from 1987-89, at Pembroke College, Cambridge (1989-1990), and finally at the "Universitaet Hamburg", where he obtained his Diploma in 1992 (supervisor Professor Klaus Fredenhagen). He obtained his Ph.D. from Cambridge in 1995 with a thesis on conformal field theory, written under the supervision of Professor Peter Goddard. Afterwards he was for two years Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge, intermitted by a year as Research Associate at Harvard (1996/97). He became College Lecturer at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge in 1998. In 1999 he was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship, which he first held at Cambridge, and then, from October 2000 onwards, at King's College, London. In 2003 he became Professor at the ETH Zurich. He spent the fall terms 2002 and 2010 as a sabbatical member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

His research has mostly been concerned with string theory and conformal field theory. Recently he has mainly worked on the AdS/CFT correspondence for the case of AdS3/CFT2. In particular, he has identified the world-sheet theory that is dual to the symmetric orbifold CFT2. This allows for a proof of the AdS/CFT duality in this example.