Dr Benjamin Doyon
Telephone: +44 020 7848 2854
Email: benjamin.doyon@kcl.ac.uk
Office: S4.12, Strand Building, Strand Campus
Title: Lecturer in Theoretical Physics
Personal Website
Biography
Dr Doyon was an undergraduate at Université Laval (Québec, Canada) from 1995 to 1998, where he obtained his baccalaureate degree in physics. He completed his PhD studies on the subject of integrable quantum field theory from 1998 to 2004 at Rutgers University (New Jersey, U.S.A.), partly funded by a four-year NSERC (Canada) fellowship and under the supervision of Prof. Sergei Lukyanov. While at Rutgers, he also participated in a programme of study and research in mathematics under the supervision of Prof. James Lepowsky, and had the opportunity to work in condensed matter theory with Prof. Natan Andrei.
He then obtained an EPSRC postdoctoral research fellowship from 2004 to 2007, spent at the Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics of Oxford University under the guidance of Prof. John Cardy. He was lecturer in mathematics in the theoretical physics group of Durham University from 2007 to 2009, where he started the supervision of his first PhD student in the summer of 2009. He was then appointed to a lectureship at King's College London from January 2010. He recently obtained an EPSRC First Grant in mathematics (2010-2012).
Research Interests
Benjamin's research interest is in quantum field theory, in particular the integrable or conformal kind. He is quite interested in looking at QFT as a powerful theory for emergent fluctuations (collective behaviours) in many-body systems. This point of view connects it to condensed matter and statistical systems, but also provides a fundamental understanding of renormalisation group and an alternative view on the fundamental particles of physics. One of his present research paths is to develop the connection between mathematical measures (conformal loop ensembles) describing emergent fluctuations for a large class of statistical models, and the algebraic construction of conformal field theory based on the usual tools and ideas of QFT.
Other research paths include: the physics and mathematical formulation of quantum impurities out of equilibrium; the entanglement entropy in extended quantum systems; the relation between classical integrability and twist fields in quantum field theory models of free particles; as well as various fundamental aspects of relativistic integrable quantum field theory and conformal field theory, including the study of form factors and of vertex operator algebras.
Selection of Publications
A short selection of his recent publications:
B. D., Calculus on manifolds of conformal maps and CFT, preprint arXiv:1004.0138 (52 pages)
B. D., Conformal loop ensembles and the stress-energy tensor. I. Fundamental notions of CLE, preprint arXiv:0903.0372 (61 pages); II. Construction of the stress-energy tensor, preprint arXiv:0908.1511 (62 pages); a combined version is to be published in Comm. Math. Phys.
P. Calabrese, J. Cardy and B. D. (Eds.), Entanglement entropy in extended quantum systems, J. Phys A 42 (2009) special issue.
O. A. Castro Alvaredo and B. D., Bi-partite entanglement entropy in massive 1+1-dimensional quantum field theories, J. Phys. A 42 (2009) 504006, preprint arXiv:0906.2946 (50 pages).
O. A. Castro Alvaredo and B. D., Bi-partite entanglement entropy in QFT with a boundary: the Ising model, J. Stat. Phys. 134 (2009) 105-145, preprint arXiv:0810.0219 (41 pages).