Mikhail Shifman


Mikhail "Misha" Arkadyevich Shifman is a theoretical physicist, formerly at Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics, Moscow, Ida Cohen Fine Professor of Theoretical Physics, William I. Fine Theoretical Physics Institute, University of Minnesota.

Scientific contributions

Shifman is known for a number of basic contributions to quantum chromodynamics, the theory of strong interactions, and to understanding of supersymmetric gauge dynamics. The most important results due to M. Shifman are diverse and include the discovery of the penguin mechanism in the flavor-changing weak decays ; introduction of the gluon condensate and development of the SVZ sum rules relating properties of the low-lying hadronic states to the vacuum condensates ; introduction of the invisible axion first exact results in supersymmetric Yang-Mills theories ; heavy quark theory based on the operator product expansion ; critical domain walls in super-Yang-Mills ; non-perturbative planar equivalence between super-Yang-Mills and orientifold non-supersymmetric theories ; non-Abelian flux tubes and confined monopoles. His paper with A. Vainshtein and Zakharov on the SVZ sum rules is among the all-time top cited papers in high-energy physics.

Honors and awards

Mikhail Shifman received the Alexander-von-Humboldt Award in 1993, the Sakurai Prize in 1999, the Ida Cohen Fine Chair in Theoretical Physics and the Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize in 2006; he is the 2007 laureate of the Blaise Pascal Chair, 2013 Pomeranchuk Prize and he was awarded the 2016 Dirac Medal and Prize. In May 2018, M. Shifman was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences. He is also a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Selected books