About

Dmitri Bykov received his Ph.D. from Trinity College, University of Dublin, in 2011, his supervisor being Prof. Sergey Frolov. The same year he joined Nordita for his first postdoc.

During Dmitri's Ph.D. years his research was mainly related to two-dimensional sigma models, in particular with regards to their application to the so-called AdS/CFT correspondence, especially in the large N limit. In this regime the AdS/CFT correspondence may be described is a duality relating a planar gauge theory to the free string described by the string sigma model (with target spaces of the form AdS times a compact manifold). Dmitri's research was related to computing string energies and related quantities directly from the sigma model, i.e. «from the first principles», and these results were later used to compare with the predictions of the Bethe ansatz. Sigma models in general provide interesting examples of interacting quantum field theories, in which many complicated questions of QFT can be addressed.

Dmitri's recent research has been focused on developing a particular spin chain regularization of sigma models with homogeneous target spaces, which was first pioneered by D. Haldane, and revealing the mathematical structures behind it.