Zooming In: Stringing It All Together

Naomi Gendler ’16 is on her way to finding the most fundamental explanation of our universe.

If you zoomed in super close on anything—say, your shirt or your phone or this very magazine—you’d eventually start to see atoms, electrons, and nuclei made of protons and neutrons. If you zoomed in even more, you’d begin seeing quarks. String theory postulates that if you zoomed in farther than that, you’d find something even more fundamental that makes up all those other particles: little vibrating strings. The different ways those strings vibrate correspond to the different particles and forces that we can see.

That’s how Naomi Gendler ’16 explains string theory. Until string theory, there was no way to combine gravity and quantum mechanics into a single theory useful at probing all energies. But with this solution comes another problem, the biggest complaint about string theory: it’s not testable. “String theory does make predictions,” Naomi explains, “but not at the energies that we can ever probe with technology we can build.” Her research, as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, focuses on figuring out which signatures of string theory might be observable with current experiments.

To do this, Naomi focuses on determining the observable characteristics of axions that come from string theory. Axions are hypothetical particles particularly interesting to physicists because they are considered one of the best candidates for dark matter, a form of matter invisible to current detectors. By writing code that scans through extra-dimensional shapes and computing resulting properties of axions in each possible universe, Naomi seeks to answer: What does string theory have to say about our prospects for detecting axions, and if we do detect axions, what does string theory suggest their properties will be? All hope is not lost for connecting string theory with experiments we can conduct in our lifetime, according to Naomi. Though the task will be difficult, she’s up for the challenge. “I always just wanted to get to the most fundamental explanation of our universe,” Naomi says. “I think that’s what drew me to string theory, because it is the most fundamental explanation we have.”

Tags: Alumni, Climate, Sustainability, Environmental, Research