Simon Caron-Huot

Last updated

Simon Caron-Huot (born 1984 in Saint-Eustache, Quebec) is a Canadian theoretical physicist. [1]

Contents

Education and career

In 2009 Simon Caron-Huot graduated with a Ph.D. in physics from McGill University. His Ph.D. thesis was supervised by Guy David Moore. [2] [3] Caron-Huot was from 2009 to 2014 a postdoctoral member of the Institute for Advanced Study. At the Niels Bohr Institute he held a postdoctoral position from 2012 to 2016. At McGill University, he was from 2016 to 2022 an assistant professor and is since 2022 an associate professor. [4] He has been a Visiting Fellow at the Perimeter Institute. [5] [6]

Research

Caron-Huon does research on scattering amplitudes in quantum chromodynamics and N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory, as well as the quark-gluon plasma in heavy ion collisions. [7] He, with colleagues such as Nima Arkani-Hamed, Freddy Cachazo, and Johannes Henn, have done research on symmetries that link gravity, the energy levels of the hydrogen atom, and the strong and weak interactions. Such mathematical symmetries open up the possibility that the N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory is the first nontrivial quantum field theory in four dimensions that can be solved exactly. Caron-Huon and colleagues showed that, in this type of Yang-Mills theory, bound states can be solved exactly due to hidden conformal symmetries, similar to the quantum mechanical Kepler problem (with the Laplace-Runge-Lenz vector as a conserved quantity). [8]

Awards and honours

In 2017 Simon Caron-Huot received the Gribov Medal for "his ground-breaking conttibutions to the understanding of the analytic structure of scattering amplitudes and their relation to Wilson loops." [9] In 2018 the International Colloquium on Group Theoretical Methods in Physics (ICGTMP) awarded the ICGTMP's Hermann Weyl Prize to him and David Simmons-Duffin. [10] [11] In 2020 Simon Caron-Huot was awarded a two-year Sloan Research Fellowship, and he and Pedro Vieira were awarded the New Horizons in Physics Prize for "profound contributions to the understanding of quantum field theory." [12] The Canadian Association of Physicists (CAP) awarded Caron-Huot the 2021 CAP Herzberg Medal for "his creation and development of nonperturbative techniques in conformal field theory, thereby opening the way to broad-ranging applications from particle physics to condensed matter physics." [13] In 2023 he received the Larkin Junior Researcher Award of the William I. Fine Theoretical Physics Institute. [14] In 2024 the Niels Bohr International Academy, which is hosted by the Niels Bohr Institute, awarded him the Lars Kann-Rasmussen Prize. [15]

Selected publications

Related Research Articles

In theoretical physics, twistor theory was proposed by Roger Penrose in 1967 as a possible path to quantum gravity and has evolved into a widely studied branch of theoretical and mathematical physics. Penrose's idea was that twistor space should be the basic arena for physics from which space-time itself should emerge. It has led to powerful mathematical tools that have applications to differential and integral geometry, nonlinear differential equations and representation theory, and in physics to general relativity, quantum field theory, and the theory of scattering amplitudes.

The history of string theory spans several decades of intense research including two superstring revolutions. Through the combined efforts of many researchers, string theory has developed into a broad and varied subject with connections to quantum gravity, particle and condensed matter physics, cosmology, and pure mathematics.

In representation theory, a Yangian is an infinite-dimensional Hopf algebra, a type of a quantum group. Yangians first appeared in physics in the work of Ludvig Faddeev and his school in the late 1970s and early 1980s concerning the quantum inverse scattering method. The name Yangian was introduced by Vladimir Drinfeld in 1985 in honor of C.N. Yang.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MHV amplitudes</span> Maximally helicity violating amplitudes

In theoretical particle physics, maximally helicity violating amplitudes (MHV) are amplitudes with massless external gauge bosons, where gauge bosons have a particular helicity and the other two have the opposite helicity. These amplitudes are called MHV amplitudes, because at tree level, they violate helicity conservation to the maximum extent possible. The tree amplitudes in which all gauge bosons have the same helicity or all but one have the same helicity vanish.

In theoretical physics, a mass generation mechanism is a theory that describes the origin of mass from the most fundamental laws of physics. Physicists have proposed a number of models that advocate different views of the origin of mass. The problem is complicated because the primary role of mass is to mediate gravitational interaction between bodies, and no theory of gravitational interaction reconciles with the currently popular Standard Model of particle physics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Amplituhedron</span> Geometric structure used in certain particle interactions

In mathematics and theoretical physics, an amplituhedron is a geometric structure introduced in 2013 by Nima Arkani-Hamed and Jaroslav Trnka. It enables simplified calculation of particle interactions in some quantum field theories. In planar N = 4 supersymmetric Yang–Mills theory, also equivalent to the perturbative topological B model string theory in twistor space, an amplituhedron is defined as a mathematical space known as the positive Grassmannian.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">João Penedones</span> Portuguese theoretical physicist

João Miguel Augusto Penedones Fernandes is a Portuguese theoretical physicist active in the area of quantum field theory. He is currently an associate professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL).

Jan Christoph Plefka is a German theoretical physicist working in the field of quantum field theory and string theory.

Freddy Alexander Cachazo is a Venezuelan-born theoretical physicist who holds the Gluskin Sheff Freeman Dyson Chair in Theoretical Physics at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.

Aninda Sinha is an Indian theoretical physicist working as a professor at Center for High Energy Physics, Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, India.

Double copy theory is a theory in theoretical physics, specifically in quantum gravity, that hypothesizes a perturbative duality between gauge theory and gravity. The theory says that scattering amplitudes in non-Abelian gauge theories can be factorized such that replacement of the color factor by additional kinematic dependence factor, in a well-defined way, automatically leads to gravity scattering amplitudes. It was first written down by Zvi Bern, John Joseph Carrasco and Henrik Johansson in 2010 and was sometimes known as the BCJ duality after its creators or as "gravity = gauge × gauge".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Atish Dabholkar</span> Indian theoretical physicist

Atish Dabholkar is an Indian theoretical physicist. He is currently the Director of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) with the rank of Assistant Director-General, UNESCO. Prior to that, he was head of ICTP's High Energy, Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics section, and also Directeur de Recherche at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) at Sorbonne University in the "Laboratoire de Physique Théorique et Hautes Énergies" (LPTHE).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zvi Bern</span> American theoretical particle physicist

Zvi Bern is an American theoretical particle physicist. He is a professor at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Henriette D. Elvang is a Theoretical Particle Physicist and Professor at the University of Michigan. She works on quantum field theory and scattering processes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anastasia Volovich</span> Physicist

Anastasia Volovich is a professor of physics at Brown University. She works on theoretical physics: quantum field theory, general relativity, string theory and related areas in mathematics.

Olaf Lechtenfeld is a German mathematical physicist, academic and researcher. He is a full professor at the Institute of Theoretical Physics at Leibniz University, where he founded the Riemann Center for Geometry and Physics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Furry's theorem</span> Theorem in quantum physics

In quantum electrodynamics, Furry's theorem states that if a Feynman diagram consists of a closed loop of fermion lines with an odd number of vertices, its contribution to the amplitude vanishes. As a corollary, a single photon cannot arise from the vacuum or be absorbed by it. The theorem was first derived by Wendell H. Furry in 1937, as a direct consequence of the conservation of energy and charge conjugation symmetry.

Zohar Komargodski is an Israeli theoretical physicist who works on quantum field theory, including conformal field theories, gauge theories and supersymmetry.

The Gross conjecture regarding high energy symmetry of string theory was based on the saddle-point calculation of hard string scattering amplitudes (SSA) of both the closed and open string theories. The conjecture claimed that there existed infinite linear relations among hard SSA of different string states. Moreover, these infinite linear relations were so powerful that they can be used to solve all the hard SSA and express them in terms of one amplitude. Some monographs had made speculations about this hidden stringy symmetry without getting any conclusive results. However, the saddle-point calculation of the hard SSA which was claimed to be valid for all string states and all string loop orders was pointed out to be inconsistent for the cases of the excited string states in a series of works done by the method of decoupling of zero-norm states (ZNS).

Hermann Nicolai is a German theoretical physicist and director emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam-Golm.

References

  1. "2018 Wigner and Weyl Prize Ceremony | 32nd International Colloquium on Group Theoretical Methods in Physics" (PDF).
  2. "Hard probes of the quark-gluon plasma". eScholarship@McGill. (catalogue entry; Ph.D. thesis, 2009)
  3. Simon Caron-Huot at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  4. "Simon Caron-Huot - Scholars | Institute for Advanced Study".
  5. "Simon Caron-Huot | Perimeter Institute".
  6. Caron-Huot, S. (2011). "Notes on the scattering amplitude — Wilson loop duality". Journal of High Energy Physics (7): 58. Bibcode:2011JHEP...07..058C. doi:10.1007/JHEP07(2011)058.
  7. "Simon Caron-Huot". Department of Physics, McGill University.
  8. Henn, Johannes (19 August 2015). "From the Motion of Planets to Quantum Field Theory | Institute for Advanced Study".
  9. "Simon Caron-Huot wins the 2017 Gribov Medal". News, Department of Physics, McGill University.
  10. "The Weyl Prize". International Colloquium on Group Theoretical Methods in Physics (ICGTMP).
  11. "David Simmons-Duffin". The Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy, Caltech.
  12. "2020 Breakthrough Prizes: Who won this year's 'Oscars of science'?". Science. 2019-09-05. Archived from the original on September 9, 2019. Retrieved 2020-02-11.
  13. "The 2021 CAP Herzberg Medal is awarded to Simon Caron-Huot". Publicity Release, Canadian Association of Physicists (CAP).
  14. "Larkin Award". William I. Fine Theoretical Physics Institute.
  15. "Simon Caron-Huot receives Lars Kann-Rasmussen Prize". 5 March 2024.