Mikhail Shifman

Mikhail "Misha" Arkadyevich Shifman (Михаи́л Арка́дьевич Ши́фман; born 4 April 1949) is a theoretical physicist (high energy physics), formerly at the 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 (i) the discovery of the penguin mechanism in the flavor-changing weak decays (1974); (ii) introduction of the gluon condensate and development of the SVZ sum rules relating properties of the low-lying hadronic states to the vacuum condensates (1979); (iii) introduction of the invisible (aka KSVZ) axion (1980) (iv) first exact results in supersymmetric Yang–Mills theories (NSVZ beta function, gluino condensate,1983–1988); (v) heavy quark theory based on the operator product expansion (1985–1995); (vi) critical domain walls (D-brane analogs) in super-Yang-Mills (1996); (vii) non-perturbative (exact) planar equivalence between super-Yang–Mills and orientifold non-supersymmetric theories (2003); (viii) non-Abelian flux tubes and confined monopoles (2004 till present). 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 of the ICTP. In May 2018, M. Shifman was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences. 2022: Fulbright Distinguished Scholar. In 2024, Mikhail Shifman was appointed as the University of Minnesota Regents Professor. He is also a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Political positions
In February-March 2022, he signed two open letters by Russian scientists condemning the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.