Jafferis was privately home-schooled and at age 14 began his studies at Yale University, where he graduated with a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics in 2001. He received his PhD in physics from Harvard University in 2007. His PhD thesis Topological string theory from D-brane bound states was supervised by Cumrun Vafa. Jafferis was from 2007 to 2010 a post-doctoral fellow at Rutgers University[citation needed] and from June 2010 to March 2011 a temporary member at the Institute for Advanced Study. He is a tenured professor of physics at Harvard University.
In 2012, with Silviu Pufu, Benjamin Safdi, and Igor Klebanov, he formulated a conjecture (conjectural F-theorem) about the behavior of the free energy F in renormalization group flows of a three-dimensional supersymmetric quantum field theory.
In 2016, with Ping Gao and Aron C. Wall, Jafferis proposed a mechanism for traversable wormholes without exotic matter with a description mathematically equivalent to quantum teleportation.
Awards and honors
In 2012 Jafferis received the Henry Primakoff Award of the American Physical Society for "construction and study of three-dimensionals supersymmetric quantum field theories." In 2019 he was awarded the New Horizons in Physics Prize for "fundamental insights about quantum information, quantum field theory, and gravity."
Jafferis, Daniel L.; Klebanov, Igor R.; Pufu, Silviu S.; Safdi, Benjamin R. (2011). "Towards the F-theorem: N=2 field theories on the three-sphere". Journal of High Energy Physics (6): 102. arXiv:1103.1181. Bibcode:2011JHEP...06..102J. doi:10.1007/JHEP06(2011)102.
βOfer Aharony, Oren Bergman, Daniel Louis Jafferis, Juan Maldacena: N=6 superconformal Chern-Simons-matter theories, M2-branes and their gravity duals, JHEP 0810:091, 2008, Arxiv