At Penn, I am a PhD student in the group of Prof. Vijay Balsubramanian, where I study topics in quantum information theory and AdS/CFT. (Updated further description and graphics in progress).
While at MIT I did research in theoretical cosmology for several years in Prof. Alan Guth's
Density Perturbations Group, under the direction of Prof. David Kaiser and
alongside Ani Prabhu, Evangelos Sfakianakis, and
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. A popular model of the early universe invented by Prof. Guth is that
of
We investigated a particular class of models of preheating in which multiple scalar fields coupled in a nonminimal way to the Ricci scalar.
Such scalar fields are predicted by realistic models of high-energy physics in the early universe; the nonminimal couplings are the simplest
renormalizable (mathematically consistent) interactions of scalar fields with Einstein gravity. In our papers (below), we show that the field driving
inflation (the
During the summer after my junior year at MIT I worked on a project in algebraic combinatorics applied to string theory during an eight-week summer exchange program with Prof. Amihay Hanany at Imperial College London. The abstract is as follows:
Superstring theory predicts a (9+1)-dimensional background spacetime and thus requires the orbifold compactification of six spatial dimensions, achieved by taking the quotient by a finite isometry group. Recent work in the context of quiver gauge theories has focused on enumeration of orbifolds of \(\mathbb{C}^n\) by an Abelian group, which in general can be expressed as a product of finite cyclic groups. The toric diagrams of these orbifolds are lattice simplices (generalized triangles) in \(\mathbb{R}^{n-1}\). We review crystallographic methods for enumerating inequivalent orbifolds via such toric diagrams and for obtaining analytic expressions for the resulting sequences by means of multiplicative sequences and generating functions. We then apply these methods to Abelian orbifolds of more general spaces with geometrically interesting toric diagrams, namely, the Platonic solids. Motivation for studying the Platonic solids comes from the study of quiver gauge theories; in the ADE classification of discrete subgroups of \(\text{SU}(2)\), the symmetry groups of the Platonic solids correspond to particularly simple quivers.
Here is a writeup documenting my progress and results obtained during this project, and a slideshow summarizing these results more concisely.
V. Balasubramanian, M. DeCross, and G. Sárosi. "Knitting Wormholes by Entanglement in Supergravity." arXiv:2009.08980.
V. Balasubramanian, M. DeCross, A. Kar, and O. Parrikar. "Quantum Complexity of Time Evolution with Chaotic Hamiltonians." JHEP 01 (2020) 134, arXiv:1905.05765.
V. Balasubramanian, M. DeCross, A. Kar, and O. Parrikar. "Binding Complexity and Multiparty Entanglement." JHEP 02 (2019) 069, arXiv:1811.04085.
V. Balasubramanian, M. DeCross, J. Fliss, A. Kar, R.G. Leigh, and O. Parrikar. "Entanglement Entropy and the Colored Jones Polynomial." JHEP 1805 (2018) 038, arXiv:1801.01131.
M. DeCross, D.I. Kaiser, A. Prabhu, C. Prescod-Weinstein, and E.I. Sfakianakis. "Preheating after Multifield Inflation with Nonminimal Couplings, I: Covariant Formalism and Attractor Behavior." Phys. Rev. D 97, 023526 (2018), arXiv:1510.08553.
M. DeCross, D.I. Kaiser, A. Prabhu, C. Prescod-Weinstein, and E.I. Sfakianakis. "Preheating after Multifield Inflation with Nonminimal Couplings, II: Resonance Structure." Phys. Rev. D 97, 023527 (2018), arXiv:1610.08868.
M. DeCross, D.I. Kaiser, A. Prabhu, C. Prescod-Weinstein, and E.I. Sfakianakis. "Preheating after Multifield Inflation with Nonminimal Couplings, III: Dynamical Spacetime Results." Phys. Rev. D 97, 023528 (2018), arXiv:1610.08916.
