Igor R. Klebanov (russian: И́горь Ромáнович Клеба́нов; uk, Ігор Романович Клєбанов; born March 29, 1962) is an American

theoretical physicist Theoretical physics is a branch of physics that employs mathematical models and abstractions of physical objects and systems to rationalize, explain and predict natural phenomena. This is in contrast to experimental physics, which uses experime ...

. Since 1989, he has been a faculty member at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ...

where he is currently a Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics and the Director of the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science. In 2016, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Since 2022, he is the Director of the Simons Collaboration on Confinement and QCD Strings.

Biography

Klebanov grew up in

Kharkiv Kharkiv ( uk, wikt:Харків, Ха́рків, ), also known as Kharkov (russian: Харькoв, ), is the second-largest List of cities in Ukraine, city and List of hromadas of Ukraine, municipality in Ukraine.MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

(class of 1982) and his Ph.D. degree at

in 1986 as a student of

Curtis Callan Curtis Gove Callan Jr. (born October 11, 1942) is an American theoretical physicist and the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Physics at Princeton University. He has conducted research in gauge theory, string theory, inst ...

. In his thesis he made advances in the

Skyrme model In particle theory, the skyrmion () is a topologically stable field configuration of a certain class of non-linear sigma models. It was originally proposed as a model of the nucleon by (and named after) Tony Skyrme in 1961. As a topological solito ...

hadron In particle physics, a hadron (; grc, ἁδρός, hadrós; "stout, thick") is a composite subatomic particle made of two or more quarks held together by the strong interaction. They are analogous to molecules that are held together by the e ...

s, which included the first paper on a Skyrmion crystal. Klebanov worked as a post-doc in the

SLAC Theory Group The SLAC Theory Group is the hub of theoretical particle physics research at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University. It is a subdivision of the Elementary Particle Physics (EPP) Division at SLAC. Research The group has ...

. His main contributions to string theory are in Matrix model approaches to two-dimensional strings, in

brane In string theory and related theories such as supergravity theories, a brane is a physical object that generalizes the notion of a point particle to higher dimensions. Branes are dynamical objects which can propagate through spacetime accordin ...

dynamics, and in the gauge theory-gravity duality. His work in 1996-97 on relations between branes in

supergravity In theoretical physics, supergravity (supergravity theory; SUGRA for short) is a modern field theory that combines the principles of supersymmetry and general relativity; this is in contrast to non-gravitational supersymmetric theories such as ...

and their gauge theory description anticipated the gauge theory-gravity correspondence. Klebanov's 1998 paper with his graduate student Gubser, and Polyakov, which made a precise statement of the AdS/CFT duality, is among the all-time top cited papers in high-energy physics (it has over 11,500 citations according to Google Scholar). A series of papers by Klebanov and collaborators on D-branes on the

conifold In mathematics and string theory, a conifold is a generalization of a manifold. Unlike manifolds, conifolds can contain conical singularities, i.e. points whose neighbourhoods look like cones over a certain base. In physics, in particular in fl ...

has led to discovery of cascading gauge theory. Its dual warped throat provides a geometric description of

color confinement In quantum chromodynamics (QCD), color confinement, often simply called confinement, is the phenomenon that color-charged particles (such as quarks and gluons) cannot be isolated, and therefore cannot be directly observed in normal conditions b ...

and

chiral symmetry breaking In particle physics, chiral symmetry breaking is the spontaneous symmetry breaking of a chiral symmetry – usually by a gauge theory such as quantum chromodynamics, the quantum field theory of the strong interaction. Yoichiro Nambu was awar ...

; it has been used in model building for cosmology and particle physics. The relation between 3-dimensional critical O(N) model and bosonic higher-spin gauge theory in 4-dimensional AdS space has been called the Klebanov-Polyakov correspondence. Klebanov's more recent work includes the Entanglement Entropy in confining gauge theories, the F-theorem for Renormalization Group flows, large N tensor models, field theory descriptions of critical phenomena, and quantum many-body scars as group invariant states.

Honors

* 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship *2010 Princeton University Graduate Mentoring Award *2012 Elected to the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, a ...

. *2014 Tomassoni awards *2016 Elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. *2017

Pomeranchuk Prize The Pomeranchuk Prize is an international award for theoretical physics, awarded annually since 1998 by the Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP) from Moscow. It is named after Russian physicist Isaak Yakovlevich Pomeranchuk, wh ...

*2022 Oskar Klein Medal

Works

hep-th/9108019 "String Theory in Two Dimensions"
''High Energy Physics - Theory'' (hep-th) Igor R. Klebanov, 26 Aug 1991 * * * *
"Some stringy aspects of the AdS/CFT duality"
''Strings'' 2002, Igor Klebanov
Solving Quantum Field Theories via Curved Spacetimes
''

Physics Today ''Physics Today'' is the membership magazine of the American Institute of Physics. First published in May 1948, it is issued on a monthly schedule, and is provided to the members of ten physics societies, including the American Physical Society. ...

,'' Igor Klebanov and Juan Maldacena * * *

References

External links

List of his papers on Arxiv

List of his papers on Google Scholar

Igor R Klebanov"
, ''Scientific commons'' * {{DEFAULTSORT:Klebanov, Igor 21st-century American physicists Soviet emigrants to the United States Living people American string theorists Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni Princeton University alumni Princeton University faculty Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences 1962 births