Petr Hořava

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Petr Hořava is a Czech string theorist. He is well-known for his articles written with Edward Witten about the Horava-Witten domain walls in M-theory. These articles demonstrated that the ten-dimensional Heterotic $E_8 \times E_8$ string theory could be produced from 11-dimensional M-theory by making one of the dimensions have edges (the domain walls). This discovery provided crucial support for the conjecture that all string theories could arise as various limits of a single higher-dimensional theory. Horava is less well known for his discovery of D-branes, usually attributed to Dai, Leigh and Polchinski, who discovered them independently, also in 1989. He is currently a professor of physics at The University of California at Berkeley, where he frequently teaches courses on quantum field theory and string theory. Hořava is also a member of the theory group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.