Slava Rychkov Receives the Humboldt Research Award

Slava Rychkov, Permanent Professor of Physics at IHES, has been awarded the prestigious Humboldt Research Award by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

This international award recognizes the achievements of world-leading researchers for their contributions to their respective fields. It includes a personal research grant of €80,000 and enables awardees to develop research projects in collaboration with teams based in Germany, thereby strengthening international scientific cooperation. Slava Rychkov is considering to use this stipend for visits to DESY Hamburg and the University of Heidelberg.

A theoretical physicist, Slava Rychkov works at the interface of quantum field theory, critical systems, and conformal field theory, fundamental areas for understanding the microscopic laws of matter and phase transitions.

His research focuses on the development of new analytical and numerical methods for exploring non-perturbative regimes of theoretical physics.

Among his recent contributions, he has developed, together with his PhD student Nikolay Ebel and Tom Kennedy, a computer-assisted computational formalism for studying the convergence basin of renormalization group transformations in tensor networks; identified, with IHES postdoctoral researcher Fabiana De Cesare, an unexpected protected operator in O(N) models, altering certain correspondences between quantum field theory and lattice models; and explored innovative approaches to the three-dimensional Ising model using conformal perturbation theory and new geometric regularization schemes.

Here is how Salva welcomed this award:

“I am deeply honored to receive the Humboldt Research Prize. This distinction encourages the continuation of my work in theoretical physics and of international collaborations, which play an essential role in the development of our field. Conformal field theory, one of my favorite subjects, was born when Hans Kastrup, a researcher from West Germany, and Alexander Polyakov, a researcher from the Soviet Union, met at a conference in Kyiv in 1970, a story I describe in one of my recent papers”.

The Humboldt Research Award recognizes the scientific impact of this work and its influence on the ongoing development of theoretical physics. It also highlights Slava Rychkov’s international standing as one of the leading researchers in his field.