Matthew Headrick

Professor
Martin Fisher School of Physics
Brandeis University

E-mail: mph(at)brandeis.edu
My Brandeis Physics Department page
My Brandeis University page

Office: Abelson 323

I am a member of the Brandeis Quantum and Gravitational Theory Group. My research spans a variety of areas of theoretical and mathematical physics, including string theory, quantum field theory, quantum gravity, general relativity, geometry, quantum information theory, statistical mechanics, and convex optimization. Recently, the main focus of my work has been on the use of concepts and tools from quantum information theory, such as entanglement entropies, to better understand field theories, gravitational theories, and holographic dualities connecting them.

My work is supported by grants from the U.S. Department of Energy.

We are always looking for talented graduate students to join our group. If you are interested, please apply to our Ph.D. program. (I read applications only through the university's admissions process; please do not send your CV or other application materials directly to me.)

During Fall 2023 I'm teaching Physics 164: First-Year Tutorial. I also serve as Graduate Advising Head and Director of Graduate Studies for the Physics Department.

More about me and my work:

• My C.V. (including a list of my publications)
• My publications on arXiv and Inspire

Slides & videos from talks I've given recently:

• Numerical Solution of Systolic Minimal-Area Problems (Computational Differential Geometry and its Applications in Physics, Simons Center for Geometry and Physics, 2022): slides, video
• New Formulas for Holographic Entanglement Entropy (DanLennyFest, 2022): slides
• Covariant Bit Threads, Minimax Surfaces, and Entropy Inequalities (IFQ-ExU joint mini workshop: Extreme Universe from Qubits, 2021): slides, video
• Holographic Entropy Inequalities (Complex Quantum Systems and The Quantum Universe Symposium, 2021): slides, video
• Black Holes, Quantum Entanglement, and the Geometry of Spacetime (colloquium-level lunch talk, MIT, 2020): slides
• Bit Threads for Multiple Regions (New England Strings Meeting, Brown University, 2020), slides, video
• Entanglement and the Geometry of Spacetime (blackboard talk, KITP Teachers' Conference on Spacetime, Holography, and Entanglement, 2020): video

Also perhaps of interest:

• A popular-level article about holographic entanglement entropy I wrote for the newsletter of the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences, Bangalore (turn to page 4)
• A 5-minute podcast on the holographic principle
• My page of useful Mathematica packages -- including a new (as of January 2023) version of diffgeo.m that handles parametrized hypersurfaces!
• A compendium of useful formulas, mostly lifted from various textbooks such as Wald's General Relativity and Polchinski's String Theory, together with a few of my own shallow insights