Jan 2022 – Present · 4 yrs 2 mos

Nov 2020 – Jan 2021 · 2 mos · New York, United States

Mar 2020 – Present · 6 yrs

Jan 2019 – Dec 2021 · 2 yrs 11 mos

Jul 2017 – Aug 2018 · 1 yr 1 mo

• I served as a designer and instructor for the undergraduate course Astron 9 "Order of Magnitude Physics."
• I served as designer and instructor of record for the undergraduate course Astron 9 "Relativity of Space and Time in Popular Science."

Jan 2016 – Jan 2019 · 3 yrs

• Prof. Eliot Quataert Group

Sep 2015 – Dec 2015 · 3 mos

• Lead discussion section, grade and hold office hours for Ph 216 Back of the Envelope Physics, a graduate level course in order-of-magnitude estimation

Jun 2015 – Jul 2015 · 1 mo · Oakland, CA

• Tutoring SAT II Physics subject test to students, including those with learning disabilities.

Apr 2013 – Jun 2013 · 2 mos

• Lead discussion section, grade and hold office hours for Ph 17 Black Holes

Sep 2012 – Dec 2012 · 3 mos · Stanford, CA

• Lead discussion section, grade and hold office hours for Ph 45 Light and Heat

Jun 2012 – Aug 2012 · 2 mos

• I designed and taught a GRE math course for a Stanford Humanities & Sciences summer diversity recruitment program geared towards students applying to top graduate programs in disciplines ranging from English to statistics. This early identification program (EIP) hosted students who have demonstrated strong academic potential despite attending low-resource schools. Serving as math instructor required my accommodating students possessing a wide array of academic backgrounds and life experiences.

Jun 2011 – Aug 2016 · 5 yrs 2 mos · Stanford, CA

• My first year as a graduate student at Stanford featured a combination of coursework and research providing a working knowledge of modern approaches to quantum gravity. Upon gaining background in renormalization and conformal field theory from Quantum Field Theory I, II and III and rotating under Leonard Susskind, Shamit Kachru and Sean Hartnoll of the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics (SITP), I focused on using the holographic correspondence to determine whether a Fermi surface (or similar phenomena) exist in strongly coupled field theories with supersymmetry. With Martin et al., I used gauge-gravity duality to find current-current correlators and the associated spectral weight for a superconformal field theory dual to a D3-D5 brane system in the background of type IIB string theory (see Publications).
• During my second year, my focus shifted to theoretical physics at lower energy scales relevant to observations. I joined the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC) under adviser Roger Blandford (Fellow of the Royal Society and National Academy of Sciences).
• Since returning from Harvard to start the third year of my doctorate, I worked towards rendering the output of 3D general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations (e.g., from Jonathan McKinney) of jets from black holes with accretion flows in a manner that mimics or surpasses imaging from existing or planned astrophysical observations (e.g., by Event Horizon Telescope). For constant observer time movies of jet/accretion disk/black hole simulations with various emissivity prescriptions, see below and www.richardanantua.com.
• My broad research interests include: theoretical cosmology, high energy theoretical astrophysics (e.g., Blandford-Znajek jets from supermassive black holes), high energy theoretical particle physics (e.g., string theory (esp. AdS/CFT correspondence)), condensed matter theory (e.g., strongly correlated fermionic systems with holographic dual)

Sep 2010 – May 2011 · 8 mos · New Haven, CT

• From Fall 2010 to Spring 2011, I worked with Yale astrophysicist Nikhil Padmanabhan on the baryonic acoustic oscillation feature of the matter power spectrum in modified gravity theories. Baryonic matter can be overdense on scales set by the sound horizon, and the features of the two-point correlation function of the mass density field correspond to these overdensities. My task was to Fourier transform a given correlation function to obtain the linear power spectrum and then use perturbation theory to find the nonlinear power spectrum to second order from the linear power spectrum in both lambda cold dark matter gravity and modified gravity. We have written an expression for the lambda CDM nonlinear power spectrum and came close to writing one for MG.

Jan 2009 – Jan 2009 · 0 mo · New Haven, CT

• In Summer 2009, upon being awarded the Yale College Dean's Office Research Fellowship and Saybrook College Richter Fellowship, I investigated quantum measurement in the lab of Jack Harris. In particular, I helped lay groundwork that may someday culminate in the observation of energy quantization in a macroscopic mechanical oscillator. To this end, I modeled an optomechanical cavity (SiN membrane surrounded by subspherical mirrors) that may overcome limitations in determining the membrane’s energy arising from the very act of measurement on account of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. I extensively used Python code to model cavities with various lengths, radii of curvature, membrane tilts and membrane thicknesses to achieve a design in which the cavity detuning function is quadratic in the position of the membrane— a necessary condition for quantum nondemolition (QND) measurement of the mechanical oscillator’s energy eigenstate. By the end of the summer, I had designed a cavity supporting a quadratic detuning of nearly the required curvature for use in an experimental QND measurement.