Introduction
Alexander Markovich Polyakov (Russian: Алекса́ндр Ма́ркович Поляко́в; born 27 September 1945) is a theoretical physicist, formerly at the Landau Institute in Moscow and, since 1990, at Princeton University.
Important discoveries
Polyakov is known for a number of basic contributions to quantum field theory, including work on what is now called the 't Hooft–Polyakov monopole in non-Abelian gauge theory, independent from Gerard 't Hooft. Polyakov and coauthors discovered the so-called BPST instanton which, in turn, led to the discovery of the vacuum angle in QCD. His path integral formulation of string theory had profound and lasting impacts on the conceptual and mathematical understanding of the theory. His paper Infinite conformal symmetry in two-dimensional quantum field theory, with Alexander Belavin, and Alexander Zamolodchikov, founded the two-dimensional Conformal Field Theory; it has classic status. He also played an important role in elucidating the conceptual framework behind renormalization independent of Kenneth G. Wilson's Nobel Prize–winning work. He formulated pioneering ideas in gauge/string duality long before the breakthrough of AdS/CFT using D-branes. Other insightful conjectures that came years or even decades before active work by others include integrability of gauge and string theories and certain ideas about turbulence.
Very early in his career, in a 1965 student work, Polyakov suggested (with Alexander Migdal) a dynamical Higgs mechanism, slightly after but independently from the publications of Peter Higgs and others. The paper was delayed by the Editorial Ofiice of JETP, and was published only in 1966.
Honors and awards
Alexander Polyakov was awarded the Dirac Medal of the ICTP and the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics in 1986, the Lorentz Medal in 1994, the Oskar Klein Medal in 1996, the Harvey Prize in 2010 and the Lars Onsager Prize (together with A. Belavin and A. Zamolodchikov) in 2011. On 20 March 2013, Alexander Polyakov was announced the recipient of 2013 Fundamental Physics Prize.
He was elected to the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1984 and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in 2005.