David Poland

David Poland
Born
🏳️ Citizenship	United States
🎓 Alma mater	Massachusetts Institute of Technology (B.S.) University of California, Berkeley (Ph.D.)
💼 Occupation
Known for	Conformal bootstrap Solving the 3D Ising model
🏅 Awards	NSF CAREER Award (2014) Arthur Greer Memorial Prize (2017)

David Poland is an American theoretical physicist and Associate Professor of Physics at Yale University. He is known for his pioneering contributions to the modern revival of the conformal bootstrap, a method for nonperturbatively constraining and solving conformal field theories (CFTs) using symmetry and unitarity. His work has produced the world's most precise determinations of critical exponents in the 3D Ising model and O(N) vector models, which describe phase transitions in fluids, magnets, and numerous other physical systems.

Education and career

Poland received his B.S. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2004 and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2008, where he studied physics beyond the Standard Model, supersymmetry, and dark matter.

He held postdoctoral positions as a Fellow at Harvard University (2008–2011) and a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2011–2012). He joined the faculty at Yale University in 2012. He has also served as a Junior Visiting Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study (2015–2016) and a Visiting Associate in Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology (2018–2019). He serves as Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Yale Department of Physics.

Research

Poland's research is focused on developing new nonperturbative methods for quantum field theory, with applications to particle physics, condensed matter physics, and quantum gravity. He is primarily known for his work on the conformal bootstrap, which combines constraints from conformal symmetry and unitarity to make rigorous predictions for physical observables without relying on perturbative expansions or a microscopic Lagrangian.

Conformal bootstrap revival

The conformal bootstrap was originally formulated in the 1970s and 1980s, achieving significant success in classifying two-dimensional conformal field theories. However, little progress was made in higher dimensions until a modern revival beginning around 2008. In 2010, Poland and David Simmons-Duffin were among the first to extend the numerical bootstrap method (originally introduced by Rattazzi, Rychkov, Tonni, and Vichi in four dimensions) to superconformal field theories.

3D Ising model

In a landmark 2012 paper with Sheer El-Showk, Miguel Paulos, Slava Rychkov, David Simmons-Duffin, and Alessandro Vichi, Poland showed that the 3D Ising conformal field theory sits at a distinctive "kink" on the boundary of the space of allowed CFTs. This observation enabled increasingly precise determinations of the 3D Ising critical exponents, ultimately achieving accuracies surpassing those of other methods such as Monte Carlo simulations and the epsilon expansion. Subsequent work by Poland and collaborators incorporating stress tensor correlators further improved these determinations to record precision.

Broader bootstrap program

Poland has applied the conformal bootstrap to a wide range of systems, including O(N) vector models, which describe magnets and superfluids, the Gross-Neveu-Yukawa models, supersymmetric CFTs, fermionic bootstrap problems, and quantum electrodynamics in three dimensions. He has also contributed to the development of computational techniques for conformal blocks, including five-point conformal blocks.

Simons Collaboration on the Nonperturbative Bootstrap

In 2016, Poland was awarded a $10 million grant from the Simons Foundation as one of 15 principal investigators to create the Simons Collaboration on the Nonperturbative Bootstrap, directed by Leonardo Rastelli. The collaboration brings together researchers to use symmetry and general principles of quantum mechanics to map out the space of strongly coupled quantum field theories.

Students and postdocs

Poland's research group at Yale has trained several researchers who have made significant contributions to the conformal bootstrap program.

His PhD students include Filip Kos (PhD 2016), who was a key co-author on the series of papers bootstrapping the 3D Ising and O(N) models; Soner Albayrak (PhD 2021), who developed analytic bootstrap techniques for fermionic conformal field theories; Rajeev Erramilli (PhD 2023), who created the blocks_3d and hyperion-bootstrap software packages for computing general spinning conformal blocks and applied them to obtain world-record precision bounds on the Gross-Neveu-Yukawa models; and Matthew Mitchell (PhD 2025), who obtained improved bootstrap results for the 3D Ising model using stress tensor correlators and classified Gross-Neveu-Yukawa critical points.

Zhijin Li worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Poland's group and contributed to extending the conformal bootstrap to gauge theories, including studies of quantum electrodynamics in three dimensions (QED₃).

Among Poland's undergraduate mentees, Alexander Atanasov published two papers on the bootstrap for the minimal 3D N = 1 superconformal field theory while at Yale, before pursuing a PhD at Harvard University.

Awards and honors

• NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (2004)
• NSF CAREER Award (2014)
• Yale Junior Faculty Fellowship (2015)
• Arthur Greer Memorial Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication or Research (2017)

Selected publications

• Poland, David; Simmons-Duffin, David (2016). "The conformal bootstrap". Nature Physics. 12: 535–539. arXiv:1602.07982. doi:10.1038/nphys3761.
• Poland, David; Rychkov, Slava; Vichi, Alessandro (2019). "The Conformal Bootstrap: Theory, Numerical Techniques, and Applications". Reviews of Modern Physics. 91 (1): 015002. arXiv:1805.04405. Bibcode:2019RvMP...91a5002P. doi:10.1103/RevModPhys.91.015002.
• El-Showk, Sheer; Paulos, Miguel F.; Poland, David; Rychkov, Slava; Simmons-Duffin, David; Vichi, Alessandro (2012). "Solving the 3D Ising Model with the Conformal Bootstrap". Physical Review D. 86 (2): 025022. arXiv:1203.6064. Bibcode:2012PhRvD..86b5022E. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.86.025022.

External links

• Yale University faculty page
• INSPIRE-HEP profile
• Google Scholar profile
• Simons Collaboration on the Nonperturbative Bootstrap

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