NWO M-1 grant for Oliver Fabert

The Dutch Research Council (NWO) has awarded Oliver Fabert an Open Competition Domain Science M-1 grant for his research project “Floer theory for stochastic Hamiltonian systems, quantum theory, and imaginary time”, worth 350,000 Euros for 4 years to fund one PhD position. The committee awarded the scientific quality of his proposal the highest grade (“excellent”), and his research proposal even ranked first among the 30 research proposals processed together with his proposal.

Hamiltonian Floer theory and pseudoholomorphic curves are well-established elliptic PDE methods in Hamiltonian dynamics. Traditionally applied to problems from classical physics, this project seeks to extend their utility to quantum physics through stochastic Hamiltonian dynamics. While stochastic electrodynamics aims at explaining quantum effects directly through the existence of a random background field (the quantum-theoretical vacuum), other stochastic approaches to quantization rely on the observation that the Schrödinger equation can be viewed as a diffusion-type equation in imaginary time. The latter describes a surprising link, called Wick rotation, between quantum field theory and statistical field theory via the method of analytical continuation from complex analysis. In popular science, it is known as the core theoretical concept introduced in Stephen Hawking’s world-bestseller “A Brief History of Time” in order to understand the quantum theory of black holes.