2025 Jacques Solvay International Chairs in Physics

Vyacheslav Rychkov

IHES, Bures-sur-Yvette, France

Biography

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.

The renaissance of axiomatic methods in quantum field theory

Inaugural Lecture - Solvay Room on March 25th at 4:00 PM

The textbook approach to quantum field theory is to start from the Lagrangian and then either do perturbation theory or, if the theory is strongly coupled, resort to lattice Monte Carlo simulations. Recently, there has been renewed interest in developing and applying “bootstrap methods”, which have different spirit. They use nonperturbatively valid “axioms” to obtain concrete numerical results about experimentally relevant strongly coupled QFTs. I will describe these bootstrap methods and some of their applications in the study of critical phenomena and
scattering processes.

COFFEE AND TEA WILL BE SERVED AT 3:45 P.M AND DRINKS AT 5:00 P.M. IN FRONT OF THE SOLVAY ROOM

Analyticity in Quantum Field Theory

3-day course - Solvay Room

Analyticity of observables plays a major role in the S-matrix bootstrap. This blackboard course will revisit the basic notions and classic results of analyticity, according to the following plan:

Analyticity in position space. Edge-of-the-wedge theorem.
Analyticity in momentum space. Generalized retarded functions. Steinmann sphere.
Crossing. Bros-Epstein-Glaser theorem.

These lectures were recorded