Grant: Subatomic Physics Envelope - Individual

The last decade was triumphal for the Standard Model (SM), which is the field theoretical framework for strong and electroweak interactions. The two culminating events were: a) the creation of the deconfinement phase of the quark-gluon matter at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and b) the discovery of the 125 GeV Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Besides that, during past decades, a remarkable overlap of such seemingly different areas in physics as condensed matter and relativistic physics took place. It was especially clearly manifested in graphene (one atom thick sheet of carbon atoms). Such well known phenomena as the Klein paradox, the dynamics of a supercritical charge, and the dynamical generation of a Dirac mass in a magnetic field (magnetic catalysis), revealed in relativistic field theory, were first observed in studies of graphene. Still, there are unresolved problems in the SM theory, such as the origin of the mass spectrum of quarks and leptons, and the phase diagram of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) at finite density, finite temperature, and in external electromagnetic fields. These problems are connected either with still unknown or poorly understood nonperturbative dynamics in quantum field theory. This project will be devoted to studies of nonperturbative dynamics in the following three main directions: a) the dynamics of dense relativistic matter in external electromagnetic fields and its manifestations in heavy ion collisions and astrophysics (magnetars), b) the problem of the origin of the mass spectrum of quarks and leptons, and c) I am also planning to continue the studies of such relativistic like condensed matter systems as graphene and Dirac and Weyl semimetals by using advanced methods developed in quantum field theory (it is noticeable that Dirac semimetals were produced very recently, in the fall of 2013). The results obtained in this project will be relevant for: a) understanding the physics of compact stars, in particular, magnetars, and for heavy ion collisions at the RHIC and LHC experiments; b) understanding the origin of quarks and lepton masses and Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa mass matrix; c) description of dynamics and transport phenomena in graphene and Dirac/Weyl semimetals.