Renormalization group and critical phenomena
Grupo de renormalización y fenómenos críticos
- Date
- 1971-1972 · confidence high
- Place
- Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, United States
- Credited to
- Kenneth Wilson; Leo Kadanoff; Michael Fisher
- People
- 👤 Kenneth Geddes Wilson1936–2013👤 Leo P. Kadanoff1937–2015👤 Michael E. Fisher1931–2021
- Field
- Cosmos & Earth
What was discovered
The properties of a system near a phase transition are obtained by seeing how the laws change with scale, which explains the universality of critical exponents. It unifies condensed matter physics with quantum field theory.
Nobel Prize for Wilson in 1982.
What it led to
- Understanding of phase transitions and universality
- Asymptotic freedom and lattice QCD
- Effective field theories
- Physics of complex systems
Built on
- Quantum electrodynamics (QED)1947-1949
- Renormalisation in QED
- Kadanoff's spin blocks (1966)
- Landau's theory of phase transitions
Made possible
- Asymptotic freedom and quantum chromodynamics (QCD)1973
- Lattice QCD simulations
- Design of materials near critical points