Group members

Dr. Nikolay Gromov

Nikolay Gromov graduated from Saint-Petersburg State University in January 2005. He obtained his PhD in École normale supérieure in co-tutelle with Saint-Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute in November 2007. He held postdoctoral positions between 2007-2008 in CEA Saclay in France, and between 2008-2010 in DESY and Hamburg University, Germany. In April 2010 he joined King’s College as a Lecturer in Theoretical Physics, and was promoted to Reader in September 2014, followed by promotion to Professor in 2018.

Professor Gromov's research interests include different approaches in non-perturbative Yang-Mills theory. The first approach is devoted to confinement/deconfinement phase transition and is based on classical configurations, generalizing the instantons.

Another approach is based on the remarkable duality between the N = 4 super-symmetric generalization of 4D Yang-Mills theory and 10D string theory in the AdS5 x S5 background. Integrability allows one to write down the equations describing exactly the spectrum of these theories and easily reproduce very complicated perturbation theory calculations.

Dr. Michelangelo Preti

Michelangelo graduated in November 2012 from Parma University (Italy) where he also obtained his PhD in March 2016. His first research experience was at DESY Hamburg (Germany) 2016-2017. He then held postdoctoral positions between 2017-2019 in École Normale Supérieure (France), and between 2019-2021 in NORDITA (Sweden). In January 2021 he joined King’s College London as a Research Associate in the Theoretical Physics group, working in the group of Professor Nikolay Gromov.

Michelangelo's research interests lie at the intersection of many areas of theoretical physics: integrable models in the context of AdS/CFT correspondence, defect theories and conformal bootstrap. In recent years remarkable connections have been observed between these areas and Michelangelo's past and present research deals with trying to better understand the structure underlying such relations. In particular, he succesfully developed “bootstrability” a new method that exploit the synergy of integrability and conformal bootstrap to compute structure constants in conformal field theories.

Dr. Paul Ryan

Paul completed his PhD at Trinity College Dublin in August 2021 before joining the Theoretical Physics group at King's College London. During his PhD studies he held a visiting PhD position at Nordita, Stockholm. Prior to his PhD studies he completed his undergraduate studies also at Trinity College Dublin and his Masters education was done at the University of Hamburg and DESY Hamburg.

Paul's main research interests are related to integrable models, the role of representation theory in solving such models and in the development of non-perturbative techniques. He is one of the leaders in the modern ``separation of variables" approach to computing correlation functions in integrable systems.

Nika Sokolova

Originally from Saint Petersburg, Nika has completed bachelor and master degrees in theoretical physics. She has finished the PSI program at the Perimeter Institute. After that, she joined the group as a PhD student. At the moment, she is trying to see if conformal bootstrap techniques could work well for integrable gauge theories.

Associated group members

Dr. Julius

Julius grew up in Bangalore and obtained his masters degree from BITS-Pilani Hyderabad in 2017. In 2021 he completed his PhD at King’s under the supervision of Nikolay Gromov. After a brief stint at the Euler International Mathematical Institute in Saint Petersburg, he is back at King’s as a postdoc with the integrability group. His research interests are on the bootstability branch of the group’s overall program, which focuses on injecting input from integrability into self-consistency constraints (bootstrap equations), to try to calculate beyond-the-spectrum observables in interacting non-abelian gauge theories in higher dimensions.

Nicolò Primi

Born in Italy, Nicolò Primi got his B.Sc. and M.Sc. at the University of Perugia. He then obtained a MASt in Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. He joined KCL integrability group as a Ph.D. student in 2019, studying applications of Integrability to High Energy Physics. At the moment he is developing new techniques in the SoV framework, as well as implementing new algorithms to solve the QSC at strong coupling.

Past group members

Dr Andrea Cavaglià

After completing his PhD at City University London and holding a postdoctoral position in Turin, Andrea joined Nikolay Gromov's group in 2017 before leaving to take up a permanent position in Turin in 2022. He has worked on numerous aspects of the project ranging from quantum spectral curves to being at the forefront of the modern separation of variables and the bootstrability techniques.