Vijay Balasubramanian
Cathy and Marc Lasry Professor
My work in particle physics has focused on basic questions concerning
the nature of space and time. I have worked on the origin of the
thermodynamics of gravitating systems and the apparent loss of quantum
information in the presence of black holes. My work has shown ways in
which the familiar smooth structure of space-time can emerge as a
long-distance effective description of more complex underlying physical
constructs. My work has also explored how the matter and forces whose
existence is known from laboratory experiments and astrophysical
measurements arise from a fundamental unified theory of forces, matter
and spacetime. zz
My interests in the nature of information, and the ways it is produced,
processed and transmitted have led to my present research in
neuroscience. My ongoing work shows how numerous structural and
functional aspects of the organization of sensory systems can be
understood as adaptations to efficiently process the information in
natural stimuli, subject to the metabolic, spatial, temporal and noise
constraints inherent in biological computation. I aim to develop these
ideas into a framework for explaining the structural and functional
organization of cortical circuitry.
I have also written on problems in statistical inference and machine
learning, and in particular on "Occam's Razor", i.e., the tradeoff
between simplicity and accuracy in quantitative models.
Education:
Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from Princeton University
M.S. in Computer Science from M.I.T.
B.S. degrees in Physics and Computer Science from M.I.T.
Research Interests:
String Theory, Particle Physics, High Energy Physics, Neuroscience
Selected Publications:
Four Dimensional Black Hole Microstates: From D-branes to Spacetime Foam. Vijay Balasubramanian (Pennsylvania U.) , Eric G. Gimon (UC, Berkeley & LBL, Berkeley), Thomas S. Levi (LBL, Berkeley) . UPR-1154-T, LBNL-60486, Jun 2006. 32pp.
Using cosmology to constrain the topology of hidden dimensions. Joan Simon (Pennsylvania U.) , Raul Jimenez (Pennsylvania U. & Carnegie Inst. Observ.) , Licia Verde (Pennsylvania U.) , Per Berglund (New Hampshire U.) , Vijay Balasubramanian (Pennsylvania U.) . UPR-T-1153:-UNH-06-04, May 2006. 4pp.
Information Recovery From Black Holes. Vijay Balasubramanian (Pennsylvania U.) , Donald Marolf (UC, Santa Barbara) , Moshe Rozali (British Columbia U. & Perimeter Inst. Theor. Phys.) . Apr 2006. 8pp.
Integrability versus information loss: A Simple example. Vijay Balasubramanian, Bartlomiej Czech, Klaus Larjo, Joan Simon (Pennsylvania U.) . UPR-T-1142, Feb 2006. 15pp.
Massless black holes and black rings as effective geometries of the D1-D5 system. Vijay Balasubramanian (Pennsylvania U.) , Per Kraus (UCLA) , Masaki Shigemori (Caltech) . UPR-1128-T, UCLA-TEP-05-25, CALT-68-2573, Aug 2005. 45pp.
The Library of Babel: On the origin of gravitational thermodynamics. Vijay Balasubramanian (Pennsylvania U.) , Jan de Boer (Amsterdam U.) , Vishnu Jejjala (Durham U., Dept. of Math.) , Joan Simon (Pennsylvania U.) . UPR-1127-7, ITFA-2005-37, DCTP-05-33, Aug 2005. 72pp.
The Library of Babel. Vijay Balasubramanian (Pennsylvania U.) , Vishnu Jejjala (Durham U., Dept. of Math.) , Joan Simon (Pennsylvania U.) . DCTP-05-21, UPR-1124-T, May 2005. 7pp.
V. Balasubramanian, M.J. Berry and D. Kimber. Metabolically efficient information processing. Neural Computation 13(4):799-816, 2001.
V. Balasubramanian and M.J. Berry. Evidence for metabolically efficient codes in the retina. Network 13(4):531-553, 2002.
K. Koch, J. McLean, M.J. Berry, P. Sterling, V. Balasubramanian, M.A. Freed. Efficiency of information transmission by retinal ganglion cells. Current Biology 14:1523-1530, 2004.