Of Particular Significance

And the New Rich and Famous Man Is: Sasha Polyakov

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

POSTED BY Matt Strassler

ON 03/20/2013

As I think most of us in the field expected, professor Alexander Polyakov was selected from among the nominees as the winner of  a cool $3 million check  Fundamental Physics Prize today. 

Polyakov (who has spent the last two decades at Princeton University; the average wealth in that town has increased slightly in the last two years) is legendary for his wide-ranging contributions to theoretical physics, and he is certainly deserving of some fame outside the physics community.  We owe him a great deal for our understanding of many aspects of quantum field theory (the mathematical technology used in the so-called Standard Model to describe the known elementary particles and forces, and also used widely in the physics of solids, in string theory, and elsewhere.)  Much of his work, starting in the 1960s and 1970s, and continuing to the present, allowed quantum field theorists to study, understand and/or discover crucially important phenomena which cannot be explored using the famous but quite limited methods of “perturbation theory”, of which Feynman diagrams are an example.  His name or initial appears on many objects and phenomena of importance in physics (‘t Hooft-Polyakov magnetic monopoles, Polyakov loops, BPST instantons, BPZ conformal blocks, and so on); you’ll find his name in the title of over 500 papers.  He was perhaps the first person to show that if string theory and quantum field theory were somehow equivalent (an idea that goes back to the 1970s) then the string theory would have more spatial dimensions than the field theory does — a notion that was eventually explicitly realized in the AdS/CFT (or “gauge/string”) correspondence for which Juan Maldacena is famous.  (The two next papers on that subject, appearing almost simultaneously following Maldacena’s 1997 work, were one by Witten and one by Gubser, Klebanov and… Polyakov.) He even did some work relevant for the current Higgs excitement, back in the 1960s.  I cannot hope to convey how much I have learned about quantum field theory from his papers.  In short: hearty congratulations to Professor Polyakov!

NOTE ADDED: I have noticed that a number of people are referring to Professor Polyakov as a “string theorist”.  Perhaps this was inevitable, given the politics of the field and of the relevant blogs, but it greatly diminishes Polyakov’s work to reduce him to a single label.  Yes, he did some of the most foundational work in string theory.  But that’s not all, by any means; many of his most famous and lasting contributions lie outside of string theory, addressing basic issues in quantum field theories (magnetic monopoles, quantum tunneling [“instantons”], phase transitions) that are or could well be relevant in the Standard Model and/or in some of its possible extensions, such as Grand Unification.  And even many of his contributions to string theory involved very fundamental issues in quantum field theory which have application outside of string theory as well (properties of scale-invariant [technically, “conformally” invariant] theories.)   In short, his work is important to all people who use quantum field theory, including but not limited to string theorists, and he deserves the highest respect for his contributions to our understanding of some very subtle aspects of our world.

Just to drive the point home, I’d like to quote from Caltech Professor John Preskill’s post from last December, describing Polyakov; Preskill is about 15 years older than I am.

“I have never gotten to know Sasha Polyakov well, but like all theoretical physicists of my generation I hold him in awe. When I was a graduate student in the late 1970s, there were two great physicists who seemed to be leading most of the great advances in quantum field theory: Polyakov and Gerard ‘t  Hooft…. What those two achieved in the 70s and early 80s is truly astonishing.

There are close parallels in the work of ‘t Hooft and Polyakov. They independently discovered that magnetic monopoles arise as solitons in spontaneously broken gauge theories. Both made fundamental contributions to our understanding of the role of quantum tunneling (“instantons“) in quantum field theory, and  recognized that quark confinement hinges on the topology of gauge fields. Aside from all that, Polyakov launched the path integral approach to string theory in non-critical dimensions, and  laid out the formalism of two-dimensional conformal field theory, a contribution just as seminal in condensed matter physics as in particle theory.”

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10 Responses

  1. On the centenary of Einstein’s theory,it will be a breakthrough in Fundamental physics.

    UNIFIED FIELD THEORY author CHAYKIN on www.chaykins.ru

    In this paper, based on the uniform super fluid substance (vacuum liquid) is identical with the equations of the electromagnetic field and gravitational field.
    These differential equations are corrected by the author equations of electrodynamics Maxwell:
    1. Excluded vortex field, the electric field is always potentially.
    2. Time-varying magnetic field is interpreted as a charge density offset and added to the real density of the charges.
    For the successful application of modified equations of electrodynamics to gravity, enough gravitational mass to be considered as a gravitational charge, having the same dimensionality as the electric charge.
    This weight is multiplied by of the gravitational constant of Newton in degree 1/2.
    Gravity currents are conventional mechanical pulses multiplied by this factor also leads to a vertical gravitational fieldes, as in electrodynamics and with the same consequences……

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  3. Nobody knows that, but there is an electrically neutral magnetic monopole as a solution to the classical Dirac-Maxwell equations for a self-acting electron (Chris Radford et al, http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9510065 and the following papers). I hope this looks absurd and it is another way to reveal the physical absurdity of self-acting ansatz.

  4. Dear Professor,

    Forgive me for asking, but how do you know this? The information is not on the FPP web site…

    1. Define your terms. I’m in New York, where are you? And what do you mean “move the milestones forward for mankind?”

      Polyakov has contributed very substantially to our understanding of how quarks and gluons become protons and neutrons in the early universe; of why and how protons and neutrons form at all; of the great puzzle known as the strong CP problem, which is what led to the idea of axions as a possible candidate for dark matter; of phase transitions in materials of various types; and much more. Now if you don’t consider understanding these various essential aspects of our world important, then of course you won’t view the milestones as moved. But we are talking about real things in our real world, not mathematical abstractions, and it seems to me that every step that humans take in comprehending the world around us is is a moved milestone for humankind.

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