Jorge Pullin - Research

Research

Pullin's book (with R. Gambini) Loops, Knots, Gauge Theories and Quantum Gravity surveys the state of the art in loop quantum gravity at the time of its publication. Reviewer Jerzy Lewandowski writes "the book should allow people from outside the loopy circles to gain access in the current state of the art. But most of all it allows experts within this wide field to learn more about the original constructions which were invented and applied in quantization of gravity by Gambini and Pullin themselves." Chris Isham adds that "this is a most valuable addition to the scientific literature", while Hugo A. Morales-Técotl calls it "useful for an immersion in the subject."

Pullin's most-cited research paper, on nonstandard optics, studies the propagation of light within theories of loop quantum gravity and shows that these theories lead to predictions of behavior different from Maxwell's equations for light propagation in classical physics. Pullin, Gambini, and Bernd Brügman also wrote a series of papers that make an important connection between knot theory and quantum gravity, by showing that the Jones polynomial can be used to solve a quantum form of Einstein's equations.

Pullin is also known for a series of papers on the theory and numerical simulation of colliding black holes. Pullin's early work on the subject (including his second most cited paper, from 1994) involves the "close approximation" in which a pair of nearby black holes is treated mathematically as a single non-spherical black hole; since joining LSU his work on this area has been based instead on supercomputer simulation. Another pair of his papers studies a simplified mathematical model of the radiation emitted when a star collapses into a black hole, and shows that it compares favorably to numerical simulations.