Aron C. Wall

Aron Clark Wall is an American theoretical physicist, specializing in quantum gravity. He is Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge, and is one of the winners of the 2019 New Horizons in Physics Prize.

Biography and education

He was born on June 7, 1984, the son of programmer Larry Wall. He received a B.A. in liberal arts in 2005 from St. John's College (Annapolis/Santa Fe) and a Ph.D. in physics in 2011 from the Maryland Center for Fundamental Physics of the University of Maryland, College Park, under advisor Ted Jacobson.

From 2011 to 2014 he was a Simons postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara, from 2014 to 2017 a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, from 2017 to 2019 a fellow at the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics. In 2019, he joined the Cambridge University Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics as a lecturer, and in 2024 he was promoted to professor of theoretical physics.

Research In 2016, together with Ping Gao and , he proposed a mechanism for traversable wormholes without exotic matter. It is based on the interpretation of wormholes as pairs of quantum entangled particles (EPR) by Leonard Susskind and Juan Martín Maldacena, known as the ER-EPR conjecture; however, Wall and colleagues did not use the usual Einstein-Rosen Bridges, but their wormhole model provides a mathematically equivalent description to quantum teleportation.

Most cited peer-reviewed publications Wall AC. Maximin surfaces, and the strong subadditivity of the covariant holographic entanglement entropy. Classical and Quantum Gravity. 2014 Nov 4;31(22):225007. Cited 403 times according to Google Scholar Engelhardt N, Wall AC. Quantum extremal surfaces: holographic entanglement entropy beyond the classical regime. Journal of High Energy Physics. 2015 Jan;2015(1):1-27. Cited 355 times