Denis Bashkirov joined the Institute in October 2015. He got his PhD in 2012 from
Caltech and did a first postdoc at the Perimeter Institute. He works on conformal
bootstarp methods and gauge-gravity duality.
In the academic year 2015/2016 D. Bashkirov worked on formal aspects of Quan-
tum Field Theory. Based on the recent work on local Renormalization Group, in his
paper ’Quantum Field Theory, Causal structures and Weyl transformations’[16] he
argued that QFT may be viewed as a quantum mechanical system which lives on the
space of causal structures of spacetime manifolds rather than on the space of met-
rics. A metric appears at intermediate steps in calculations, but any two choices of it
within the same causal class are equivalent which manifests itself in (local) RG flow.
He worked out several consequences of this point of view which differ from common
expectations.
Since then D. Bashkirov has been working on a refinement of this proposal as
well as on two main challenges of this approach : 1) to explain the fact that coupling
constants in Nature are indeed constants to a very high degree (rather than functions
on spacetime), which is not natural ; 2) to consistently incorporate gravity. The results
of this work will be presented in an upcoming paper.
Institut de Physique Théorique Philippe Meyer
Accueil > Recherche > Physique des hautes énergies
Denis Bashkirov
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