Alexander Arkadyevich Migdal

Alexander Migdal 2013

Alexander Arkadjewitsch Migdal ( Russian Александр Аркадьевич Мигдал , often quoted as AA Migdal; * 1945 in Moscow ) is a Russian-American theoretical physicist and software developer and entrepreneur.

life and work

Migdal is the son of Arkadi Beinussowitsch Migdal . He won the Soviet Mathematical Olympiad with his friend Alexander Markowitsch Polyakow and studied at Lomonosov University . In 1961 they were also among the last students of Lew Landau , who soon had an accident - they passed his entrance test for the theoretical minimum in mathematics, although they were only 15 years old. Landau wrote them a letter of recommendation so that they could take the entrance exams for the university before their final exams at school (in addition, Migdal was a Jew, which at that time in the Soviet Union was an obstacle to admission to the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics at Lomonosov University was). He graduated from Lomonosov University in 1967. In 1969 he went to the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics , where he received his habilitation in 1973 on Euclidean field theory (Russian doctorate).

In the mid-1960s, together with Polyakov, he independently discovered the phenomenon of the mass generation of vector mesons through spontaneous symmetry breaking (Higgs phenomenon), but both were not heard in the Soviet Union, since at that time, under the influence of Landau and his school, the quantum field theory was completely discredited (instead one relied on S-matrix theory as in the West ). Also in the 1960s (1967/68) he and Wladimir Naumowitsch Gribow introduced critical indices and anomalous dimensions into field theory (analogy between statistical mechanics - theory of phase transitions - and relativistic field theories of elementary particles / high-energy physics via Euclidean field theory) and he developed it in the 1970s ideas that later led to conformal field theory, at that time already in exchange with foreign scientists like Leo Kadanoff . This was done independently and further in the West through Kenneth Wilson ( renormalization group , anomalous dimensions), who also presented his ideas in Soviet-US American conferences at the Landau Institute in the early 1970s.

In the 1970s he pursued analogies from statistical mechanics in the Euclidean formulation of quantum chromodynamics and developed the Migdal-Kadanoff recursion relations for gauge theories and in the 1980s a formulation of quantum chromodynamics with Wilson loop variables (with Yu. M. Makeenko) , that is dynamics of loop variables. This also provided a connection between QCD and string theory in the case of many degrees of freedom of color ( Large N QCD ). In the 1990s he worked on the theory of turbulence , where he also applied a loop variable formalism that he had developed.

With his students Volodja Kazakow and Iwan Kostow he developed a theory of quantum gravity as a statistical theory of matrices (dynamics of randomly fluctuating surfaces described by triangulation). This led to the exact solution of quantum gravity in two space-time dimensions. This was further developed by David Gross , Édouard Brézin , Stephen Shenker and Michael R. Douglas , among others .

He stayed at the Landau Institute until 1984 and was then at a section for complex problems in cybernetics at the Soviet Academy of Sciences. In 1988 he went West and taught at Princeton University . In the mid-1990s he switched to software development and founded his own company (VWPT). Since 2000 he has been working on stock trading systems.

Fonts

QCD = Fermi string theory , Nucl. Phys. B, Vol. 189, 1981, pp. 253-294
Recursion equations in gauge theories , Sov. Phys. JETP, Vol. 42, 1975, p. 413
Phase transitions in gauge and spin lattice systems , Sov. Phys. JETP, Vol. 42, 1975, p. 743
Loop equations and 1 / N expansion , Physics Reports Vol. 102, 1983, pp. 199-290
with Makeenko Quantum Chromodynamics as dynamics of loops , Nuclear Physics B, Vol. 188, 1981, pp. 269-316
with Makeenko Self-consistent area law in QCD , Phys. Lett. B, Volume 97, 1980, pp. 253-256
with VA Kazakov Baryons as solitons in loop space , Phys. Lett. B, Volume 103, 1981, pp. 214-218

Web links

Individual evidence

↑ In contrast to his father, who is quoted from AB Migdal
^ Polyakov, Migdal Spontaneous Breakdown of Strong Interaction Symmetry and the Absence of Massless Particles , Sov. Phys. JETP 24 (1), 1967, pp. 91-98. They discovered this as early as 1964, because of the opposition of the dominant Landau school it was rejected twice by JETP and only published in Russian in 1966, when François Englert , Robert Brout , Peter Higgs and others had already published in the West.
↑ At that time as part of the so-called Regge field theory (after Tullio Regge ), which arose from the S-matrix theory of strong interaction and was completely superseded by quantum chromodynamics (QCD) from around 1973 .

personal data
SURNAME	Migdal, Alexander Arkadyevich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Мигдал, Александр Аркадьевич
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Russian-American physicist
DATE OF BIRTH	1945
PLACE OF BIRTH	Moscow

[1] In contrast to his father, who is quoted from AB Migdal

[2] Polyakov, Migdal Spontaneous Breakdown of Strong Interaction Symmetry and the Absence of Massless Particles , Sov. Phys. JETP 24 (1), 1967, pp. 91-98. They discovered this as early as 1964, because of the opposition of the dominant Landau school it was rejected twice by JETP and only published in Russian in 1966, when François Englert , Robert Brout , Peter Higgs and others had already published in the West.

[3] At that time as part of the so-called Regge field theory (after Tullio Regge ), which arose from the S-matrix theory of strong interaction and was completely superseded by quantum chromodynamics (QCD) from around 1973 .