New Members : Meer Ashwinkumar (UNIBE), Baptiste Cerclé (EPFL) & Toyomu Matsuda (EPFL)

19 Nov 2023

Welcome to Meer Ashwinkumar, Baptiste Cerclé and Toyomu Matsuda.

Ashwin’s research in quantum field theory and string theory has primarily involved the investigation of their underlying mathematical structures. His previous postdoctoral fellowship was at the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe, The University of Tokyo. There, he primarily investigated the discretizations and dualities of 2d integrable quantum field theories from the perspective of 4d Chern-Simons theory, as well as 3d theories of quantum gravity holographically described by ensemble averages of CFTs over Narain moduli spaces, which has connections to the mathematics of geometric topology and number theory. At present, his research interests concern the mathematics of supersymmetric and Chern-Simons theories in various dimensions, integrable lattice models/field theories, and their associated dualities.

Baptiste did his PhD thesis at Université Paris-Saclay, under the supervision of Colin Guillarmou and Vincent Vargas. During this thesis he studied a family of two-dimensional quantum field theories, called Toda conformal field theories, based on a probabilistic definition of these models. More generally he is interested in the mathematical study of models coming from the physics, but he tends to focus on conformal field theories linked to Liouville quantum gravity. The range of tools needed to provide a rigorous understanding of such theories is quite wide but strongly relies on probability theory and more specifically on Gaussian Free Fields and the theory of Gaussian Multiplicative Chaos.

Toyomu is interested in broad topics around probability and stochastic analysis. His previous works include singular SPDEs, Anderson Hamiltonians, fractional stochastic calculus and regularisation by noise. Currently, he is most interested in an interface model in disordered system, called quenched Edwards--Wilkinson model.

New Members : Aleksei Andreev (UZH), Philémon Bordereau (EPFL) & Elias Dubno (UZH)

Vincent Tassion receives 2023 Golden Owl