Berkeley Physics welcomes our newest faculty member:
Luca Iliesiu
Luca Iliesiu received his BA in Physics from Princeton University in 2015 and remained there for his PhD which he received in 2020. He was then appointed as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, where he was part of the Simons Ultra Quantum Matter Collaboration before starting as an assistant professor at Berkeley in January 2024.
Luca is a high-energy theorist with a broad set of interests in quantum field theory, quantum gravity, and their relation to particle and condensed matter physics. On the gravity side, he seeks to understand how gravitational objects, such as black holes, obey the rules of quantum mechanics. Recent research highlights include resolving the longstanding problem of the breakdown of thermodynamics for low-temperature black holes, recovering the integer degeneracy of supersymmetric black hole microstates by solely using the gravitational path integral, or understanding how global symmetries are violated in quantum gravity due to non-perturbative effects. On the quantum field theory side, he is interested in understanding the space of such theories using analytic and numerical constraints. To understand the possible universality classes in such a space, he helped develop the spinning conformal bootstrap, placing the first, and, so far, best constraints on CFTs with fermionic degrees of freedom.