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Soviet influences on Kenneth Wilson’s renormalization group work

Nature Physics volume 19, pages 1525–1526 (2023)Cite this article

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Kenneth Wilson worked on the renormalization group during the Cold War, when communication between scientists in the Soviet Union and in the West was restricted. Nevertheless, Soviet physicists had a strong influence on Wilson’s work.

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Fig. 1: Bertrand Halperin, Kenneth Wilson and Mark Azbel in Moscow in 1977.

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Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to B. L. Altshuler and to A. M. Polyakov for sharing their insights on theoretical developments of critical phenomena in the former Soviet Union with me. I also thank J. S. Langer for telling me about the Azbel seminars, and for contributing the photograph of Bertrand I. Halperin, Kenneth G. Wilson and Mark Ya. Azbel in Moscow in 1977. This work was supported by DOE Basic Energy Sciences grant DE-SC0020353; in its final stages, I was visiting the Aspen Center for Physics, which is supported by National Science Foundation grant PHY-2210452.

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  1. Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ, USA

    P. Chandra

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Chandra, P. Soviet influences on Kenneth Wilson’s renormalization group work. Nat. Phys. 19, 1525–1526 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-023-02191-4

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