Babak Haghighat

About me

I did my undergraduate and master at the University of Bonn from 2001 to 2006. Then I was a visiting fellow at the University of Wisconsin Madison until April 2007 when I returned to Bonn to pursue my Ph.D. under the supervision of professor Albrecht Klemm. After graduating from Bonn in 2010, I spent a one-year postdoc at ITF Utrecht. After that I was a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University from 2011 to 2016. During this time I spent 2 years at the Harvard Physics Department and 3 years at the Harvard Mathematics Department. In 2016, I joined the String Theory Group of Yau Mathematical Science Center, Tsinghua University as a faculty member.

Research

My research focuses on diverse aspects of superconformal theories (SCFTs) in various dimensions and their connection to string theory and topological string theory. This research lies at the interface between Physics and Mathematics and connects to the mathematics of various moduli spaces, algebraic and enumerative geoemtry as well as the theory of modular and automorphic forms. On the physics side it connects to perturbative and non-perturbative aspects of supersymmetric quantum field theories (QFTs) and their various observables.
More recently, I have been working on topological quantum field theories in low dimensions and have studied their connection to 2d CFT as well as topological phases of matter. Mathematically, these results are related to representation theory and fusion category as well as to knot invariants.
A list of my publications can be found at inSPIRE.

My Group

Postdocs

	Lorenzo Ruggeri	Tsinghua	email

PhD Stutents

	Yihua Liu	Jin Chun Yuan West Building	email
	Youran Sun	Jin Chun Yuan West Building	email

Former members

	Xia Gu	Now at BIMSA	email
	Wei Cui	BIMSA	email
	Jin Chen	Now at Xiamen University	email
	Marcus Sperling	Now at Nanjing University	email
	Rui Sun	Now at KIAS	email
	Shuwei Liu	Now at Perimeter	email
	Shuhang Yang		email

Teaching

This term I am teaching the graduate level course Introduction to Quantum Field Theory.

In the past I have been teaching:

Spring 2022: Physics 0, 3D TQFTs from 6D
Fall 2021: Topological Quantum Computation
Spring 2021: Topological Field Theory
Fall 2020: Calculus I in English
Fall 2019: Calculus I in English
Spring 2019: Advanced Topics in QFT
Fall 2018: Calculus I in English
Spring 2018: 6d SCFTs and their compactifications
Fall 2017: SCFTs in various dimensions
Spring 2017: Introduction to Chern-Simons Theory

Events

• We will have a workshop on The Lotus and Swampland School/workshop taking place in Sanya from February 10-15