Issue 1, 2014
Nordita Professor Konstantin Zarembo has been awarded an ERC Advanced Grant to fund a five-year research project on Integrable Systems in Gauge and String Theory (with the acronym INTEGRAL) starting in March 2014.
The ERC Advanced Investigator Grant funding scheme targets exceptional research leaders across all fields of science and enables them to pursue frontier research of their own choice.
We congratulate Professor Zarembo on this honor and look forward to an even stronger Nordita presence in an important and rapidly developing field of research.
Theoretical particle physics has long since entered the age of precision. The accuracy of experimental measurements and theoretical calculations have reached unprecedented levels - twelve significant digits for select QED observables (anomalous magnetic moment of the electron), four significant digits for the majority of electroweak observables. In case of the strong interaction, perturbative methods give reliable predictions at asymptotically high energies, but for observables sensitive to the low-energy scale theory lags behind.
The standard calculational tools in quantum field theory are the Feynman diagrams of perturbation theory. As far as the non-perturbative, strongly-coupled regime is concerned, there is no general method of addressing conceptual problems that arise there. Any new non-perturbative result in quantum field theory requires substantial effort and non-trivial insights.
Integrable systems, and integrable field theories in particular, play a distinguished role in physics, by providing insight into genuinly non-perturbative dynamics in the strongly-coupled regime, where other available methods fail. For a long time, integrability was associated with (1+1)-dimensional systems, where it allows one to find the exact spectrum, to study thermodynamics and to compute correlation functions for a number of strongly-interacting field theories. The discovery of integrability in the AdS/CFT correspondence in 2002 opened an avenue for applying powerful methods of integrability to four-dimensional quantum field theories and ever since this has been a very active area of research worldwide. Impressive progress has been made, enabling computations that go far beyond perturbation theory and interpolate between weak and strong coupling regimes. For instance, the spectral problem in the AdS/CFT correspondence has been solved exactly with the help of the Thermodynamic Bethe Ansatz (TBA) and integrability has been successfully applied to computing scattering amplitudes and Wilson loops. The aim of the ERC funded project is to further develop methods and concepts in this area and extend the application of integrability to new systems in quantum field theory and string theory.
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