Prof David Berman

David Berman

Professor of Theoretical Physics

School of Physical and Chemical Sciences
Queen Mary University of London
www.qmul.ac.uk/spcs/staff/academics/profiles/dsberman.html
Centre for Fundamental Physics

Research

Interests

My main research interests are in M-theory, the nonperturbative version of string theory. The extended objects in M-theory are membranes and five-branes. They are related to strings and D-branes in string theory via dimensional reduction. Over the last few years, my research has been devoted to understanding the interactions of these branes. My other interests over the years have been varied and include: Holography and the AdS/CFT correspondence; noncommutative geometry; and S-duality in gauge theories. Since 2010, I have been interested in applying and extending the ideas of generalised geometry to M-theory. This has produced a duality manifest description of M-theory and has led to a reworking of many ideas in relativity to take into account duality symmetries in string and M-theory. This is still on going research and has many applications in terms of potentially reformulating what string theory is.

I have also recently taken a strong interest in Machine Learning and how ideas from physics can be used in that context.