Professor
Alexander B. Zamolodchikov
Stony Brook University
Physicist; Educator
Area
Mathematical and Physical Sciences
Specialty
Physics
Elected
2012
Alexander B. Zamolodchikov is the Yang Chen Ning - Deng Wei Chair in Physics and Astronomy at Stony Brook University. Previously, he was the Arthur W. Marks Professor and Department Chair of Anthropology at Rutgers University. Much of his work is devoted to the exact construction of a class of integrable conformal field theories and integrable perturbations of them, which break the conformal symmetry. He began his career pioneering the S-matrix approach to two dimensional integrable field theories. This led to a partial solution of a large class of models and insight into their physical properties. With Belavin and Polyakov, uncovered the structure of two-dimensional conformal field theory, which lies at the heart of critical phenomena in planar systems, as well as perturbative string theory. His work has been among the most influential in quantum field theory since the invention of renormalization. He went on to prove his c-theorem, which provided deep insight into the structure of the renormalization group in two dimensions, and prompted an entire literature of attempts to generalize it to higher dimensions. He published nearly 16,000 citations, with four individual papers receiving over 1000 citations apiece. He received Lars Onsager prize in condensed matter physics from the American Physical Society (2011), the Dannie Heineman Prize in Mathematical Physics (1999), and the Dirac Medal from the International Center for Theoretical Physics (2011).
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