Alain Rouet (born 1942 in France) is a French theoretical physicist, entrepreneur, poet, and novelist. [1]
At the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures, Rouet graduated in 1969 with an engineering degree and in 1974 with a doctorate in theoretical physics. He worked as a postdoc for the academic year 1975–1976 at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (MPA) in Munich and from 1976 to 1978 at CERN. From 1979 to 1981 he was a scientist at the CNRS at the CPT (Centre de Physique Theoretique) in Marseille-Luminy. At the same time, he acted in an advisory capacity for Aérospatiale and the French Atomic Energy Commission. From 1981 to 1982 he was Einstein Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study. [2] [3] He then moved into industry and from 1983 to 1986 was the technical director of a Thomson Group company Vidéolor, which developed television tubes. [2]
From 1986 to 2017 he was involved in the creation and development of Science & Tec, a kind of scientific think tank that provided scientific consulting services for industry. Clients included AREVA, Bosch, EADS, and TotalEnergies. Rouet was involved in the creation and support of Science & Tec subsidiaries in Germany and Italy. From 1996 to 2003 he created and developed Quantaflow, a company that designed, manufactured, and sold an innovative system of software and hardware that counted people at places like shopping centers and airports. The Quantaflow system provided distributed architecture and web services to managers and employees for analysis and certification of customer visits. [2] [4]
Rouet is known for his collaborative development in the mid-1970s with Raymond Stora and Carlo Becchi of the BRST formalism [5] (independently done by Igor Tyutin). The formalism is a method for quantizing a field theory with a gauge symmetry. In addition to quantum field theory, Rouet also did research on dynamical systems. [2]
He received, jointly with Stora, Becchi, and Tyutin, the 2009 Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics. [6]
String field theory (SFT) is a formalism in string theory in which the dynamics of relativistic strings is reformulated in the language of quantum field theory. This is accomplished at the level of perturbation theory by finding a collection of vertices for joining and splitting strings, as well as string propagators, that give a Feynman diagram-like expansion for string scattering amplitudes. In most string field theories, this expansion is encoded by a classical action found by second-quantizing the free string and adding interaction terms. As is usually the case in second quantization, a classical field configuration of the second-quantized theory is given by a wave function in the original theory. In the case of string field theory, this implies that a classical configuration, usually called the string field, is given by an element of the free string Fock space.
Nathan "Nati" Seiberg is an Israeli American theoretical physicist who works on quantum field theory and string theory. He is currently a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, United States.
A conformal anomaly, scale anomaly, trace anomaly or Weyl anomaly is an anomaly, i.e. a quantum phenomenon that breaks the conformal symmetry of the classical theory.
Montonen–Olive duality or electric–magnetic duality is the oldest known example of strong–weak duality or S-duality according to current terminology. It generalizes the electro-magnetic symmetry of Maxwell's equations by stating that magnetic monopoles, which are usually viewed as emergent quasiparticles that are "composite", can in fact be viewed as "elementary" quantized particles with electrons playing the reverse role of "composite" topological solitons; the viewpoints are equivalent and the situation dependent on the duality. It was later proven to hold true when dealing with a N = 4 supersymmetric Yang–Mills theory. It is named after Finnish physicist Claus Montonen and British physicist David Olive after they proposed the idea in their academic paper Magnetic monopoles as gauge particles? where they state:
There should be two "dual equivalent" field formulations of the same theory in which electric (Noether) and magnetic (topological) quantum numbers exchange roles.
Savas Dimopoulos is a particle physicist at Stanford University. He worked at CERN from 1994 to 1997. Dimopoulos is well known for his work on constructing theories beyond the Standard Model.
Édouard Brézin is a French theoretical physicist. He is professor at Université Paris 6, working at the laboratory for theoretical physics (LPT) of the École Normale Supérieure since 1986.
Igor R. Klebanov is an American theoretical physicist. Since 1989, he has been a faculty member at Princeton University, where he is currently a Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics and the director of the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science. In 2016, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Since 2022, he is the director of the Simons Collaboration on Confinement and QCD Strings.
The non-critical string theory describes the relativistic string without enforcing the critical dimension. Although this allows the construction of a string theory in 4 spacetime dimensions, such a theory usually does not describe a Lorentz invariant background. However, there are recent developments which make possible Lorentz invariant quantization of string theory in 4-dimensional Minkowski space-time.
Francisco José Ynduráin Muñoz was a Spanish theoretical physicist. He founded the particle physics research group that became the Department of Theoretical Physics at the Autonomous University of Madrid, where he was a Professor. He was described by his colleagues as "a scientist that always searched for excellence in research".
Renata Elizaveta Kallosh is a Russian-American theoretical physicist. She is a professor of physics at Stanford University, working there on supergravity, string theory and inflationary cosmology.
Carlo Maria Becchi is an Italian theoretical physicist.
Igor Viktorovich Tyutin is a Russian theoretical physicist, who works on quantum field theory.
André Neveu is a French physicist working on string theory and quantum field theory who coinvented the Neveu–Schwarz algebra and the Gross–Neveu model.
Christof Wetterich is a German theoretical physicist. He is known for researches in quintessence, Wetterich equation for Functional renormalization, Asymptotic safety in quantum gravity.
David B. Fairlie is a British mathematician and theoretical physicist, Professor Emeritus at the University of Durham (UK).
Augusto Sagnotti is an Italian theoretical physicist at Scuola Normale.
Stephan Narison is a Malagasy theoretical high-energy physicist specialized in quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the gauge theory of strong interactions. He is the founder of the Series of International Conferences in Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD-Montpellier) and of the Series of International Conferences in High-Energy Physics (HEPMAD-Madagascar).
Peter Christopher West, born on 4 December 1951, is a British theoretical physicist at King's College, London and a fellow of the Royal Society.
In the terminology of quantum field theory, a ghost, ghost field, ghost particle, or gauge ghost is an unphysical state in a gauge theory. Ghosts are necessary to keep gauge invariance in theories where the local fields exceed a number of physical degrees of freedom.
Claude Georges Itzykson, was a French theoretical physicist who worked in quantum field theory and statistical mechanics.