MEMO SIGNED

Project "MEMO" data sheet

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 Project objective

Quantum field theory (QFT) is undoubtedly one of the most important achievements of modern theoretical physics, with broad applications ranging from condensed matter systems to elementary particle physics. Despite its successes, the current formulation of QFT is incomplete and we lack tools to address from first principles a wide variety of interesting physical systems, including the dynamics of quarks within protons, phase transitions, and high temperature superconductors. The present project aims at addressing this issue by establishing a novel, powerful and unconventional paradigm for QFT without relying upon the existence of a perturbative expansion. The cornerstone for such a paradigm is the following remark: in a wide variety of simple examples it is possible to compute exactly the values of several observables relying solely upon the knowledge of the spectrum of solitons of the given QFT. I call this effect the memory of solitons. My goal is to establish a research group that will develop and exploit the memory of solitons to study non-perturbative aspects of QFTs. The proposed strategy to approach this problem is twofold. On the one hand I focus on the simplest QFTs to develop my intuition on concrete and explicit examples: my laboratory consists of theories having supersymmetry and/or conformal symmetry where a plethora of exact results are available in the literature. On the other I exploit geometric engineering techniques in string theory, which gives access to the non-perturbative spectrum of QFTs from a completely different angle that allows exact computations to be performed, providing new insights into the mathematical structure of the theories involved. The combination of these techniques is so powerful that I have already obtained a wide variety of results that could not be derived by any other known method.