Johannes Knaute is currently a PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam, Germany, under the supervision of Michal Heller. He will join the quantum simulation group of Erez Zohar in the Racah Institute of Physics at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem at the beginning of 2022.

 

Johannes is interested in physics topics at the intersection of quantum field theory, quantum information and gravity. He obtained his BSc and MSc in physics from Dresden University of Technology, where he worked primarily on holographic models to describe fundamental properties of Quantum Chromodynamics, which is the theory of the standard model that describes strong forces in nature. During his MSc studies, he spent a year at Princeton University, focusing on topics in high-energy theory and the development of a p-adic AdS/CFT formulation. In his doctoral research, Johannes is working with tensor networks (TNs) – a tool from quantum many-body physics – to explore thermal and real-time effects of quantum field theories. The results are relevant to understand processes happening in heavy-ion collisions and the early universe. He has also worked on the connection between complexity, a concept originating from quantum information science, and TNs, which provided insight into the quantum nature of gravity.

 

In his postdoctoral research, Johannes hopes to extend methods from TNs to study aspects of lattice gauge theories and gravitational theories. He is also exploring the prospects of quantum simulations to investigate fundamental particle physics problems.