Slava Rychkov, Physicist
Permanent professor since 2017
Slava Rychkov is a theoretical physicist developing approaches to strongly coupled quantum and conformal field theories which are not exactly solvable, with applications to high energy, statistical and condensed matter physics.
This year, Slava Rychkov has uncovered a connection between Deligne categories (mathematical structures defined by Pierre Deligne in 2004), and symmetries of probabilistic loop ensembles on lattices, playing an important role in statistical physics.
His other major project was an application of renormalization group and conformal field theory to phase transitions with a random field type of disorder.
Finally, Slava Rychkov has developed a method for analytic continuation of Euclidean conformal field theories to the Lorentzian signature, which is more direct than the classic construction of Osterwalder and Schrader (1975). This last subject was the topic of his Cours de l’IHES given in October 2019.
Slava Rychkov is Deputy Director of the Simons Collaboration on the Nonperturbative Bootstrap.
Junior Member, Institut Universitaire de France (2012-2017)
New Horizons in Physics Prize (2014)
Mergier-Bourdeix Prize (2019)