Congratulations to Tuna Yildirim for successfully defending his PhD dissertation on "Topologically Massive Yang-Mills Theory and Link Invariants."

"Yang-Mills theories describe all the physics in the Standard Model of particles. Despite incredible success with Yang-Mills theories in explaining the high-energy physics, much still should be done to make sense of the low energy regime. This is because at lower energies Yang-Mills theories can become strongly coupled making it difficult to use standard perturbative techniques. Prof. Richard Feynman had once suggested studying the low energy spectrum of Yang-Mills in 2+1 dimensions first, in order to understand the behavior of the strong coupling issue. In his thesis, Dr. Yildirim studied topologically massive Yang-Mills theory in the framework of geometric quantization. This is inherently a 2+1 dimensional theory. This theory enjoys some of the properties of Yang-Mills theories but also incorporates Chern-Simons theory which in itself can be related to knot theory. Yildirim focuses on the near Chern-Simons limit of the Topologically Massive Yang-Mills Theory. This then allows one to use knot theory to calculate topologically massive Yang-Mills theory observables in the near Chern-Simons limit, adding insight into the what is happening in strongly-coupled Yang-Mills theories."
— Vincent Rodgers, PhD advisor

Dr. Yildirim has accepted a visiting research associate position at Arizona State University.

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