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Register a new userKen Wilson -- The Early Years
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R. Jackiw
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Ken Wilson is remembered.
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This is a brief account of the legacy of Ken Wilson in statistical physics, high energy physics, computing and education.
I had the marvelous good fortune to be Ken Wilsons graduate student at the Physics Department, Cornell University, from 1972 to 1976. In this article, I present some recollections of how this came about, my interactions with Ken, and Cornell during this period; and acknowledge my debt to Ken, and to John Wilkins and Michael Fisher, who I was privileged to have as my main mentors at Cornell. I end with some thoughts on the challenges of reforming education, a subject that was one of Kens major preoccupations in the second half of his professional life.
We study the finite-size spectrum of the O($N$) symmetric Wilson-Fisher conformal field theory (CFT) on the $d=2$ spatial-dimension torus using the expansion in $epsilon=3-d$. This is done by deriving a set of universal effective Hamiltonians describing fluctuations of the zero momentum modes. The effective Hamiltonians take the form of $N$-dimensional quantum anharmonic oscillators, which are shown to be strongly coupled at the critical point for small $epsilon$. The low-energy spectrum is solved numerically for $N = 1,2,3,4$. Using exact diagonalization (ED), we also numerically study explicit lattice models known to be in the O($2$) and O($3$) universality class, obtaining estimates of the low-lying critical spectrum. The analytic and numerical results show excellent agreement and the critical low energy torus spectra are qualitatively different among the studied CFTs, identifying them as a useful fingerprint for detecting the universality class of a quantum critical point.
We review the literature on possible violations of the superposition principle for electromagnetic fields in vacuum from the earliest studies until the emergence of renormalized QED at the end of the 1940s. The exposition covers experimental work on photon-photon scattering and the propagation of light in external electromagnetic fields and relevant theoretical work on nonlinear electrodynamic theories (Born-Infeld theory and QED) until the year 1949. To enrich the picture, pieces of reminiscences from a number of (theoretical) physicists on their work in this field are collected and included or appended.
This year is the 100th birth anniversary of Richard Philips Feynman. This article commemorates his scientific contributions and lasting legacy.
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