IPhT Researcher Dalimil Mazac Secures 2025 ERC Consolidator Grant for Quantum Field Theory Mathematics

The European Research Council (ERC) formally announced on December 9, 2025, the recipients of its 2025 Consolidator Grants, an award recognizing mid-career scientists conducting exploratory research across all scientific domains. This highly competitive funding initiative, supported by the European Union's Horizon Europe programme, selected 349 researchers from 3,121 applications, allocating a total budget of €728 million.

Dalimil Mazac, a researcher at the CEA-CNRS's Institut de Physique Théorique (IPhT), received one of these grants for his work on the mathematical foundations of quantum field theory (QFT). Mazac, who has been a permanent researcher at IPhT since 2023, also holds a visiting research affiliation with the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHES) beginning in 2025. His academic background includes doctoral studies at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and postdoctoral appointments at Princeton and Stony Brook.

Mazac's project, titled HARMONICON, focuses on Connecting Harmonic Analysis and Conformal Field Theory. The research addresses the incomplete mathematical definition of QFT, despite its role as a universal predictive framework in physics. Specifically, the project aims to construct a mathematically rigorous framework for Conformal Field Theories (CFTs), a subclass of QFTs exhibiting scale invariance, with a primary objective of precisely determining the scaling exponents for physical observables in complex systems, such as three-dimensional polymers.

The research leverages Mazac's prior findings which established connections between QFT and established mathematical concepts, including L-functions relevant to prime number properties and the sphere-packing problem. His methodology involves adapting the conformal bootstrap, an algebraic formulation of CFT, to the spectral theory of automorphic forms within number theory. This interdisciplinary approach has previously yielded rigorous results concerning bounds on spectral gaps of hyperbolic manifolds and subconvex bounds on L-functions.

ERC Consolidator Grants typically provide up to €2 million over a five-year period, with an additional €1 million potentially available for essential project costs. The successful award to Mazac highlights the ERC's strategy of funding frontier research that employs mathematical rigor to advance fundamental understanding in physics by bridging disparate scientific fields.