Alexander B. Zamolodchikov

Stony Brook University, The State University of New York


Primary Section: 13, Physics
Membership Type:
Member (elected 2016)

Biosketch

Alexander Zamolodchikov is a theoretical and mathematical physicist specializing in the areas of Quantum Field Theory and Statistical Mechanics. He is known for his foundational works on Conformal Field Theories and Integrable Field Theories, as well as influential contribution to Renormalization Group (“c-theorem”) and Quantum Gravity. Zamolodchikov was born in 1952 in Dubna, USSR. He graduated from Moscow Institute for Physics and Technology in 1975 with an MSc in Nuclear Engineering, and obtained a PhD in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics from the Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP) in 1978.  He joined the research staff of the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics in 1978. Since 1990, he was a Professor at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Rutgers University. In 2016 he assumed the C. N. Yang/Wei Deng chair in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and C. N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics at Stony Brook University. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the National Academy of Sciences.

Research Interests

Alexander Zamolodchikov works on general aspects of Quantum Field Theories in two space-time dimensions, and applications to theoretical problems in Condensed Matter Physics.  He is interested in the geometry of the space of Quantum Field Theories (the “theory space”), and in particular, in the subspace of Integrable Field Theories. He also explores various mathematical aspects of quantum integrability. In terms of applications, he conducts an extended program of studying the Ising Field Theory, which describes the basic universality class of criticality in vapor-liquid transitions in two-dimensional classical gasses. He also works on applications of methods of Quantum Field Theory (in particular, the Operator Product Expansions) to non-equilibrium Statistical Mechanics, specifically to two-dimensional fluid turbulence in the regime of the inverse cascade.

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