Daniel Friedan

Daniel Harry Friedan (born October 1948 ) is an American theoretical physicist .

Friedan is the son of Betty Friedan . In his youth he composed. He first studied literature and philosophy, but then switched to physics. Friedan received his doctorate in 1980 from the University of California, Berkeley ( Nonlinear models in dimensions ). He then worked at the French nuclear research center in Saclay and from 1981 at the University of Chicago (Enrico Fermi and James Franck Institute for Physics). In 1982 he became a research fellow of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation ( Sloan Research Fellow ). Since 1989 he has been a professor at Rutgers University at the New High Energy Theory Center. ${\displaystyle 2+\epsilon }$

Friedan is best known for his work on conformal field theories in the 1980s with applications in string theory and statistical mechanics , partly with Zongan Qiu and Stephen Shenker . It built on ideas from Polyakov (path integral description of Strings 1981) on string theory and from Polyakov, Belavin and Zamolodchikov (1983) on conformal field theories. Friedan, Qiu and Shenker showed that the condition of unitarity (which is present in most of the applications of conformal field theories occurring in statistical mechanics) leads to severe restrictions on conformal field theories ( discrete series ).

Friedan was also one of the leading string theorists at the time. Recently he has been critical of string theory, which he believes is a failure because it allows for numerous background spacetimes and physics cannot predict at large length scales. Instead, he proposed a non-linear theory ( Lambda Model , the same theory that he examined in his dissertation ), which should describe the usual quantum field theory for great lengths.

In a work from 1984 he derived the Atiyah-Singer index theorem using methods of supersymmetry independently of Luis Alvarez-Gaumé .

In 1987 he was a MacArthur Fellow . In 2010 he and Shenker received the Lars Onsager Prize for fundamental work on the classification and characterization of two-dimensional unitary conformal field theories . He has been an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2014 .

Web links

• Homepage at Rutgers University with reprints of much of his work
• To receive the Lars Onsager Prize

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Daniel Friedan in the Notable Names Database (English)
2. ^ Nachlass Betty Friedan, Harvard ( Memento of the original from July 15, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
3. ^ McArthur Foundation Program 1993
4. ^ Daniel Friedan, Zongan Qiu, Stephen Shenker: Conformal Invariance, Unitarity, and Critical Exponents in Two Dimensions . In: Physical Review Letters . tape 52 , no. 18 , April 30, 1984, pp. 1575-1578 , doi : 10.1103 / PhysRevLett.52.1575 .
5. ^ Daniel Friedan: A tentative theory of large distance physics . In: Journal of High Energy Physics . tape 2003 , no. 10 , October 27, 2003, Chapter 1.3 The Failure of String Theory , p. 63-63 , doi : 10.1088 / 1126-6708 / 2003/10/063 , arxiv : hep-th / 0204131 . Daniel Friedan: Two Talks on a Tentative Theory of Large Distance Physics is also about his theory . 2002, arxiv : hep-th / 0212268 .
6. ↑ D. Friedan, P. Windey: Supersymmetric derivation of the Atiyah-Singer index and the chiral anomaly . In: Nuclear Physics B . tape 235 , no. 3 , July 2, 1984, pp. 395-416 , doi : 10.1016 / 0550-3213 (84) 90506-6 ( PDF ).