Professor Benjamin Doyon

Professor 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 on the subject of integrable quantum field theory which he studied 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 Professor Sergei Lukyanov. While at Rutgers, he also participated in a programme of study and research in mathematics under the supervision of Professor James Lepowsky, and had the opportunity to work in condensed matter theory with Professor Natan Andrei.

He 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 Professor. 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 appointed to a lectureship at King's College London from January 2010, was promoted to Senior Lecturer in September 2014, and to Reader in September 2016. He obtained an EPSRC First Grant in mathematics (2010-2012) and an EPSRC Standard Grant in mathematics (2016-2019), as Co-investigator with Olalla A. Castro Alvaredo (City, University of London). For one year from January 2019, he held the position of Royal Society Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellow and was promoted to Professor of Theoretical Physics in February 2021. He later obtained other EPSRC grants (2021-2022, 2022-2024), and since November 2021, he is extermal member of the CRM Mathematical Physics Laboratory, which is part of the Centre de Recherches Mathématiques at the Université de Montréal, Québec, Canada.

Professor Doyon was awarded the AHP Prize 2020, joint with his former PhD student Jason Myers, for their paper “Fluctuations in Ballistic Transport from Euler Hydrodynamics”.

Research interests

One of the most exciting ideas in modern science is that of emerging complex phenomena from simple fundamental laws. This beautiful idea led to many new developments in the theoretical physics of many-body systems, and is at the basis of a large variety of subjects, from fundamental particle physics to macroeconomics to life itself. In his research Benjamin studies such emerging behaviours, especially in the context of quantum and classical statistical physics, concentrating on the theoretical and mathematical aspects. He likes to obtain exact formulae and develop new methods and mathematical frameworks in order to have a good understanding of the emerging physical principles that are at play. He uses the extensive toolboxes of integrability, field theory and, recently, fluid dynamics as well as C-star algebras and functional analysis.

His early works concentrated on integrable quantum field theory, where he worked on two-dimensional critical statistical models on curved space, integrable quantum field theory at nonzero temperature, and the relation between quantum correlation functions and integrable partial differential equations. He has also developed aspects of vertex operator algebras. More recently Benjamin has studied conformal loop ensembles, conformal field theory out of equilibrium and its large-deviation theory, and quantum entanglement in many-body systems, where he co-authored the paper introducing in this area the widely used concept of branch-point twist field. Currently, he is most active both in the area of entanglement entropy and of quantum systems out of equilibrium, where he has obtained mathematically rigorous results on thermalization and generalized Gibbs ensembles. He has co-authored many of the foundation papers for the extremely active subject of generalised hydrodynamics (the hydrodynamics of integrable systems).

In 2022, he was awarded the John William Strutt, Lord Rayleigh Medal and Prize from the Institute of Physics "for pioneering contributions to a new hydrodynamic theory for the large-scale behaviours of integrable systems, which had a major influence in condensed matter, cold atomic and statistical physics research".

Further information

• Research profile & publications
• Personal website