Alexander Kovner

Professor

Physics

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Research Interests

My main research area is the theory of strong interactions. During the last several years the following three questions have taken up most of my time and effort.

What is the structure of vacuum in confining gauge theories? I have been trying to understand the vacuum of QCD with the help of variational methods, as well as using ideas based on spontaneous breaking of magnetic symmetry.

What is the physics of the finite temperature deconfining phase transition? Again I have tackled this question variationally. I have also studied lower dimensional confining systems where the transition characteristics can be calculated exactly and the physics of the transition is very neatly understood in terms of the topology of the low energy degrees of freedom.

How do hadrons interact at high energy? I have been actively involved in the programm to derive the QCD evolution equation at high partonic density and study its consequences for inclusive as well as exclusive observables.

Apart from these questions I have maintained interest in the dynamics of supersymmetric theories, relevance of monopoles to the mechanism of confinement and also in the more formal problem of bosonisation in higher dimensions.

CV

Education

• Ph.D., Physics, Tel Aviv University, 1989
• M.Sc., Physics, Tel Aviv University, 1983
• B.Sc., Physics, Tel Aviv University, 1982

Experience

• 2004-present: Professor, Department of Physics, University of Connecticut
• 2001-2004: Senior Lecturer and PPARC Advanced Fellow, University of Plymouth, UK
• 1997-2000: PPARC Advanced Fellow, Oxford University, UK
• 1994-1997: Research Associate, Theoretical Physics Institute, University of Minnesota
• 1992-1994: Postdoctoral Fellow, Los Alamos National Laboratory, USA
• 1989-1992: Postdoctoral Fellow, Physics Department, University of British Columbia

Honors

• 2001 PPARC Advanced Fellow, University of Plymouth, UK
• 2001 Scientific associate, CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
• 2000 Visiting CNRS Fellow, University of Marseille-Luminy, France
• 1997 PPARC Advanced Fellow, Oxford University, UK