C.N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics

2003 Nobel Laureate David Gross presented the 2024 Colloquium, the third in this annual series. In a wide-ranging review of the discovery and development of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), a cornerstone of the Standard Model of fundamental matter and forces. In a spirited presentation, Prof. Gross gave students, postdocs and faculty alike a first-hand perspective of the ideas and experiments that led to the threshold of the discovery of asymptotic freedom, the signature property of nonabelian gauge theories like QCD, and to the consequences that have flowed from that discovery.   The colloquium was a standing-room only affair, capping a day of conversations, including a lunch with graduate students.

Xinan Zhou, a 2018 YITP graduate was awarded the 2024 ICTP Prize “for novel and outstanding contributions leading to new techniques to compute correlation functions in conformal field theories in the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence, and for developing new approaches to the analytic conformal bootstrap”.   Working here with Leonardo Rastelli, Xinan went on to a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University, and in 2021 joined the faculties of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Sciences, the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and ShanghaiTech University.

The ICTP Prize is designed to recognize outstanding early-career research of faculty in developing countries.   Xinan follows in the footsteps of distinguished YITP alumnus Ashoke Sen, who received the prize in 1989.

The YITP is delighted to learn that our colleague Distinguished Professor Alexander (Sasha) B. Zamolodchikov, C.N. Yang - Wei Deng Professor of Theoretical Physics will share the 2024 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, "for profound contributions to statistical physics and quantum field theory, with diverse and far-reaching applications in different branches of physics and mathematics."

Founded in 2012, the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics is one of the most prestigious international prizes in science worldwide.  This is the third Breakthrough Prize to be shared by Stony Brook faculty.  At the YITP, Sasha joins Distinguished Professor Emeritus Peter van Nieuwenhuizen as a Breakthrough Prize laureate (2019), and in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, the T2K group (2016).

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C.N. Yang Colloquium Series Presents Prof. Serge Haroche, 2012 Nobel Laureate

Quantum Science with Giant Atoms

September 19, 2023
Coffee/Tea at 3:45pm, Simons Center Lobby
Lecture, 4:15pm, Simons Center Della Pietra Family Auditorium, Room 103

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