Jorge Zanelli

Jorge Zanelli
Education
Known for
AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship (1997)
Scientific career
FieldsTheoretical physics
Workplaces
Thesis Studies in Supersymmetry and Cosmology  (1982)
Max Dresden

Jorge Zanelli Iglesias is a Chilean theoretical physicist who works at the Centro de Estudios Científicos (CECs) in Valdivia with a joint appointment at Universidad San Sebastian. His research deals with gravitation, black holes and supergravity. With Máximo Bañados and Claudio Teitelboim (now Claudio Bunster) he found the BTZ black hole solution in 1992.

In 2007 Zanelli was appointed as an advisor for the Chilean government on nuclear energy. He led a working group on nuclear power convened by President Michelle Bachelet, and he served several terms on the council of the Chilean Nuclear Energy Commission.

Education

Zanelli studied physics at the University of Chile, in Santiago. He received a PhD from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1982, supervised by Max Dresden. His thesis studied supersymmetry in cosmological models. He later spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, working on the quantum aspects of cosmological models.

Career

Zanelli was an associate professor at the University of Chile from 1985 to 1995 and a professor at the University of Santiago from 1995 to 2001. He is currently a researcher at CECs and at San Sebastian University. He has edited several conference volumes, among them, with Teitelboim, the proceedings of the Quantum Mechanics of Fundamental Systems meetings held in Santiago in 1987 and 1990, and, with Marc Henneaux, the 2009 volume Quantum Mechanics of Fundamental Systems: The Quest for Beauty and Simplicity. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1997.

Research

Black holes in three dimensions

In 1992 Bañados, Teitelboim and Zanelli showed that general relativity in two space dimensions and one time dimension, with a negative cosmological constant, has a black-hole solution. In a 1993 paper with Marc Henneaux, the four authors showed that the solution has constant negative curvature and is obtained from anti-de Sitter space by identifying points under a discrete group of its symmetries. The solution shares many features of the Kerr black hole, among them an event horizon, an inner horizon, an ergosphere and a non-zero Hawking temperature, while being simple enough that many quantum calculations can be done exactly, which is not practical in four spacetime dimensions. In 1998 Andrew Strominger computed the entropy of black holes of this kind from the growth of the number of quantum states and found precise agreement with the Bekenstein–Hawking formula. Zanelli and his collaborators later found a charged rotating version of the solution and exact black-hole solutions with scalar fields in three and four dimensions. Four-dimensional black holes with a scalar field and a negative cosmological constant found by Martínez, Troncoso and Zanelli are known as MTZ black holes.

Higher-dimensional gravity and Chern–Simons supergravity

With Teitelboim, Zanelli formulated Lovelock gravity, a generalization of general relativity to higher dimensions whose field equations are still of second order, in Hamiltonian form. With Bañados and Teitelboim he found black-hole solutions of a family of these theories, which they called dimensionally continued black holes, and related their entropy to a dimensional continuation of the Gauss–Bonnet theorem. In odd dimensions, a particular choice of coefficients turns Lovelock gravity into a Chern–Simons theory whose gauge group is the symmetry group of anti-de Sitter space. Zanelli and his collaborators constructed supersymmetric versions of these theories, among them supergravity theories in seven and eleven dimensions (with Ricardo Troncoso, 1998). He has reviewed the subject in lecture notes, in a 2012 review article and in a 2016 book written with Mokhtar Hassaine.

Unconventional supersymmetry

In 2012, with Pedro Alvarez and Mauricio Valenzuela, Zanelli proposed a locally supersymmetric theory in 2+1 dimensions that describes gravity, the electromagnetic field and a spin-½ Dirac field. Its action is a Chern–Simons form, but the theory has no spin-3/2 gravitino, so it is not a supergravity theory, and its fields need not form supersymmetric pairs of equal mass. With Laura Andrianopoli, Mario Trigiante and others, he later derived models with this "unconventional" supersymmetry at the boundary of four-dimensional anti-de Sitter supergravity and used them to describe electronic properties of graphene-like materials.

Public service

On 13 March 2007, by a decree of the Ministry of Mining, President Bachelet created a working group on nuclear electricity generation (Grupo de Trabajo en Núcleo-Electricidad) chaired by Zanelli. Its task was to advise the ministry on the opportunities, challenges and risks of using nuclear power to generate electricity in Chile. The group, dubbed the "Zanelli Commission", reported in September 2007 that the information it had examined did not allow nuclear power to be ruled out as a future energy option for Chile. According to MercoPress, the commission also concluded that Chile was not yet ready for nuclear power, institutionally or legally, and that the state would have to pay for at least part of any nuclear plant.

Zanelli was a member of the council of the Chilean Nuclear Energy Commission (CChEN) from 1998 to 2000 and from 2006 to 2010. He was appointed to the council again from November 2014 to January 2017.

Honours

Selected publications

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "Jorge Zanelli Iglesias". Perfil de investigadores. Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo. Retrieved 1 November 2026.
  2. 1 2 "Zanelli, Jorge". INSPIRE-HEP. Retrieved 1 November 2026.
  3. 1 2 Bañados, Máximo; Teitelboim, Claudio; Zanelli, Jorge (1992). "The black hole in three-dimensional space-time". Physical Review Letters. 69 (13): 1849–1851. arXiv:hep-th/9204099. Bibcode:1992PhRvL..69.1849B. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.69.1849. PMID 10046331.
  4. 1 2 Carlip, Steven (1995). "The (2+1)-dimensional black hole". Classical and Quantum Gravity. 12 (12): 2853–2880. arXiv:gr-qc/9506079. doi:10.1088/0264-9381/12/12/005.
  5. ↑ "Chilean science with a global impact: researchers projecting Chile's research potential in the world". Marca Chile. 22 July 2025. Retrieved 1 November 2026.
  6. 1 2 3 Grupo de Trabajo en Núcleo-Electricidad (September 2007). La opción núcleo-eléctrica en Chile (PDF) (Informe) (in Spanish). Presentación; annex reproducing Decreto Nº 49 (Ministerio de Minería, 13 March 2007). Retrieved 1 November 2026. El Grupo de Trabajo estará presidido por don Jorge Zanelli Iglesias
  7. 1 2 Avaria, Gonzalo (11 May 2026). "1986 no es un argumento: el debate de la energía nuclear en Chile" [1986 is not an argument: the nuclear energy debate in Chile]. CIPER Chile (Opinion column) (in Spanish). Retrieved 1 November 2026.
  8. 1 2 3 4 5 "Bachelet nombra a Jaime Tohá como nuevo presidente del Consejo de la Comisión de Energía Nuclear" [Bachelet names Jaime Tohá new president of the council of the Nuclear Energy Commission]. El Mostrador (in Spanish). 7 November 2014. Retrieved 1 November 2026.
  9. ↑ Zanelli, Jorge (1982). Studies in Supersymmetry and Cosmology (PhD thesis). State University of New York at Stony Brook – via INSPIRE-HEP.
  10. ↑ "Investigador Jorge Zanelli: «Energía nuclear no es una competencia para las ERNC»" [Researcher Jorge Zanelli: "Nuclear energy is not competition for non-conventional renewables"]. Revista Electricidad (in Spanish). 23 July 2014. Retrieved 1 November 2026.
  11. ↑ Teitelboim, Claudio; Zanelli, Jorge, eds. (1989). Quantum Mechanics of Fundamental Systems 2. New York: Plenum. doi:10.1007/978-1-4613-0797-6. ISBN 978-1-4612-8087-3.
  12. ↑ Teitelboim, Claudio; Zanelli, Jorge, eds. (1992). Quantum Mechanics of Fundamental Systems 3. New York: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-1-4615-3374-0.
  13. ↑ Henneaux, Marc; Zanelli, Jorge, eds. (2009). Quantum Mechanics of Fundamental Systems: The Quest for Beauty and Simplicity. New York: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-0-387-87499-9. ISBN 978-0-387-87498-2.
  14. 1 2 "Jorge Zanelli Iglesias". John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Retrieved 1 November 2026.
  15. ↑ Bañados, Máximo; Henneaux, Marc; Teitelboim, Claudio; Zanelli, Jorge (1993). "Geometry of the (2+1) black hole". Physical Review D. 48 (4): 1506–1525. arXiv:gr-qc/9302012. Bibcode:1993PhRvD..48.1506B. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.48.1506. PMID 10016387.
  16. ↑ Strominger, Andrew (1998). "Black hole entropy from near-horizon microstates". Journal of High Energy Physics. 1998 (2): 009. arXiv:hep-th/9712251. Bibcode:1998JHEP...02..009S. doi:10.1088/1126-6708/1998/02/009.
  17. ↑ Martínez, Cristián; Teitelboim, Claudio; Zanelli, Jorge (2000). "Charged rotating black hole in three spacetime dimensions". Physical Review D. 61 (10) 104013. arXiv:hep-th/9912259. Bibcode:2000PhRvD..61j4013M. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.61.104013.
  18. ↑ Martínez, Cristián; Zanelli, Jorge (1996). "Conformally dressed black hole in (2+1)-dimensions". Physical Review D. 54 (6): 3830–3833. arXiv:gr-qc/9604021. Bibcode:1996PhRvD..54.3830M. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.54.3830. PMID 10021058.
  19. ↑ Martínez, Cristián; Troncoso, Ricardo; Zanelli, Jorge (2003). "De Sitter black hole with a conformally coupled scalar field in four dimensions". Physical Review D. 67 (2) 024008. arXiv:hep-th/0205319. Bibcode:2003PhRvD..67b4008M. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.67.024008.
  20. ↑ Martínez, Cristián; Troncoso, Ricardo; Zanelli, Jorge (2004). "Exact black hole solution with a minimally coupled scalar field". Physical Review D. 70 (8) 084035. arXiv:hep-th/0406111. Bibcode:2004PhRvD..70h4035M. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.70.084035.
  21. ↑ Grandclément, Philippe; Nicoules, Jordan (2022). "Boundary conditions for stationary black holes: Application to Kerr, Martínez-Troncoso-Zanelli, and hairy black holes". Physical Review D. 105 (10) 104011. arXiv:2203.09341. Bibcode:2022PhRvD.105j4011G. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.105.104011.
  22. ↑ Teitelboim, Claudio; Zanelli, Jorge (1987). "Dimensionally continued topological gravitation theory in Hamiltonian form". Classical and Quantum Gravity. 4 (4): L125. Bibcode:1987CQGra...4L.125T. doi:10.1088/0264-9381/4/4/010.
  23. ↑ Bañados, Máximo; Teitelboim, Claudio; Zanelli, Jorge (1994). "Dimensionally continued black holes". Physical Review D. 49 (2): 975–986. arXiv:gr-qc/9307033. Bibcode:1994PhRvD..49..975B. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.49.975. PMID 10017056.
  24. ↑ Bañados, Máximo; Teitelboim, Claudio; Zanelli, Jorge (1994). "Black hole entropy and the dimensional continuation of the Gauss-Bonnet theorem". Physical Review Letters. 72 (7): 957–960. arXiv:gr-qc/9309026. Bibcode:1994PhRvL..72..957B. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.72.957. PMID 10056581.
  25. 1 2 Zanelli, Jorge (2005). "Lecture notes on Chern-Simons (super-)gravities". arXiv:hep-th/0502193.
  26. ↑ Bañados, Máximo; Troncoso, Ricardo; Zanelli, Jorge (1996). "Higher dimensional Chern-Simons supergravity". Physical Review D. 54 (4): 2605–2611. arXiv:gr-qc/9601003. Bibcode:1996PhRvD..54.2605B. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.54.2605. PMID 10020940.
  27. ↑ Troncoso, Ricardo; Zanelli, Jorge (1998). "New gauge supergravity in seven and eleven dimensions". Physical Review D. 58 (10) 101703. arXiv:hep-th/9710180. Bibcode:1998PhRvD..58j1703T. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.58.101703.
  28. ↑ Zanelli, Jorge (2012). "Chern-Simons forms in gravitation theories". Classical and Quantum Gravity. 29 (13) 133001. arXiv:1208.3353. Bibcode:2012CQGra..29m3001Z. doi:10.1088/0264-9381/29/13/133001.
  29. ↑ Hassaine, Mokhtar; Zanelli, Jorge (2016). Chern–Simons (Super)Gravity. Hackensack, NJ: World Scientific. Bibcode:2016cssg.book.....H. doi:10.1142/9863. ISBN 978-981-4730-93-8.
  30. ↑ Alvarez, Pedro D.; Valenzuela, Mauricio; Zanelli, Jorge (2012). "Supersymmetry of a different kind". Journal of High Energy Physics. 2012 (4): 058. arXiv:1109.3944. Bibcode:2012JHEP...04..058A. doi:10.1007/JHEP04(2012)058.
  31. ↑ Andrianopoli, Laura; Cerchiai, Bianca L.; D'Auria, Riccardo; Gallerati, Antonio; Noris, Ruggero; Trigiante, Mario; Zanelli, Jorge (2020). "N-extended D = 4 supergravity, unconventional SUSY and graphene". Journal of High Energy Physics. 2020 (1): 084. arXiv:1910.03508. doi:10.1007/JHEP01(2020)084.
  32. 1 2 "Copper pushes Chile closer to the nuclear energy option". MercoPress. 12 December 2007. Retrieved 1 November 2026.