Non-Linear Electrodynamics and its Applications

ABSTRACT
In 1934 Born and Infeld constructed the first non-linear generalization of Maxwell's electrodynamics that turned out to be a remarkable theory in many respects. In 1936 Heisenberg and Euler computed an effective action describing non-linear corrections to Maxwell's theory due to quantum electron-positron one-loop effects. Since then, these and a variety of other models of non-linear electrodynamics proposed in the course of decades have been extensively studied and used in a wide range of areas of theoretical physics including string theory, gravity, cosmology and condensed matter (CMT). In this talk I will overview general properties of non-linear electrodynamics and the most interesting (from my point of view) models which are distinguished by their symmetry properties, such as a recently discovered unique non-linear modification of Maxwell's electrodynamics which is conformal and duality invariant. I will also sketch how non-linear electromagnetic effects may manifest themselves in physical phenomena (such as vacuum birefringence), in properties of gravitational objects (such as charged black holes) and in the evolution of the universe, and can be used, via gravity/CMT holography, for the description of properties of certain conducting and insulating materials.

BIO
Dmitri Sorokin is a research staff member at Padua Division of INFN. He received his PhD under supervision of Prof. Dmitri Volkov and Dr. Vladimir Tkach at Kharkov University (Ukraine) in 1985. He was a research associate at Kharkov Institute of Physics and Technology, postdoctoral researcher at INFN, Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at Humboldt University of Berlin and visiting professor at Valencia University. He received an Award of the Ministry of Public Education of Poland in 2001 and Ukrainian State Prize in Science and Technology in 2009. His major interests and contributions have been in the geometrical description of string and brane dynamics, symmetries and dualities in field and string theories, higher spin field theories, compactification of higher dimensional supergravities and supersymmetry breaking, and very recently in non-linear electrodynamics.