Current Projects:

1. Nonperturbative Analysis of the QCD Critical Point: Regularization problems in the Effective Models and Renormalization Group Techniques
2. Dual properties of dense quark matter with color superconductivity phenomenon

Behind the HEP: A Personal Journey

First Encounter

In school, I didn’t particularly like physics — which is ironic, considering I studied in a specialized math-and-physics school. It all felt painfully dull: writing out forces, memorizing Newton’s laws, drawing endless diagrams with blocks and inclined planes… nothing about it sparked any real curiosity.

But one day, in the tenth grade, everything shifted.

My dad brought home a book titled “Thermodynamics for School Students” by Professor Kvasnikov of Moscow State University. That was the moment I realized I might actually enjoy theoretical physics. As I later learned directly from Kvasnikov, the book was an experiment — it introduced partial derivatives, integrals, probability theory, and a whole range of advanced topics, all to explain entropy, thermodynamic potentials, and partition functions in a truly consistent way.

Moscow State University

I entered the Faculty of Physics at MSU in 2004. Twenty years later, I still consider it one of the best places in the world to study physics. If you truly wanted to learn, you were always within arm’s reach of some of the best scientists in the world — and they were genuinely willing to help.

That is why in 2006 I chose the Department of Theoretical Physics under the supervision of Academician Slavnov — one of the most outstanding scientists of that era. And the rest of the professors were of an equally exceptional level.

I remained connected to the department until 2019 and still consider myself part of its history. It was there that I defended my dissertation on two-dimensional models in quantum field theory. And it was there that I taught from 2012 to 2019. These were very difficult years in my development as a scientist. Often, like many others, I felt completely stuck. Some chapters of QFT seemed almost impossible to break through — it was hard to see even the faintest glimmer of understanding or any link between those concepts and real physics. And finding a problem that no one had solved yet felt nearly hopeless.

But my natural stubbornness eventually won. I really didn’t want to give up. For more than two years, I searched for something I could hold on to. And in the end, I found a problem that one of the leading experts in the field had bypassed with the words: “in the subsequent calculations we set this variable to zero, moving to a special case, because the general case is too difficult to compute.”

It was precisely the general case that I calculated in my dissertation — a PhD project that I carried out partly at Moscow State University and partly at Humboldt University in Berlin.

Solving it led me to suspect that some of the properties I had found might also appear in more complex models. As it later turned out, these properties are present even in the full QCD Lagrangian.

Moving Forward

In 2019, I accepted an invitation from the largest private university in Georgia (the country). But I continued to work on these problems. In essence, they are connected to one of the most relevant topics today — dense quark matter. This is an exotic state of matter that is compressed so strongly that the electromagnetic interactions familiar to us simply do not have enough space. On Earth, it can be formed only in heavy-ion collisions at colliders. And in the universe — only in the interiors of compact stars. At the same time, it is the key to understanding the processes of the early universe.

Today

Since 2021, I became genuinely fascinated by the venture capital industry — its pace, its logic, its ability to turn ideas into real products. What began as curiosity quickly grew into a strong personal interest. In many ways, this new world became the main thing that made me excited to go to work every day.

At the same time, I never fully stepped away from physics. I continued writing papers, because at this point I know that theoretical physics will stay with me for the rest of my life. I spent too many years studying QCD under extreme conditions to simply disconnect from it — I’m still subscribed to these topics on arXiv and read new preprints like others read the daily news.

Since 2009 — when my first paper was published — I have written numerous articles in some of the world’s leading journals. And I’d like to believe that I’ve left a meaningful mark on the field.

My new passion has now led me to my current AI startup. But I’ve kept a permanent position at the university and continue my research whenever time and energy allow.

People

Scientific work is always a continuation of the ideas of those who came before you. It would be fundamentally wrong not to mention the people who shaped my scientific worldview. The task is impossible in the strict sense — even a short conversation at a conference with a leading figure in the field can leave an imprint on you. And your worldview is also shaped by the autobiographies of great scientists: Feynman, Dirac, Einstein, ’t Hooft…

But here I will mention only those with whom I had the privilege of working directly.

My introduction to Academician Slavnov — one of the co-authors of the quantization methods for non-Abelian gauge fields — left an enormous mark on how I see science as a whole. Throughout all my years at the department, I worked under his leadership. His style, his clarity of thought, and his depth of understanding will always remain part of my scientific DNA.

My direct PhD advisor was Professor Zhukovsky — a classic figure in the quantum theory of synchrotron radiation. It was with him that I went through the most difficult stages of my development. Without his patience and professionalism, I would not have made it through the ocean of uncertainty that drowns so many young PhD students who “sink” somewhere between intuition and formalism.

I must also mention Professor Klimenko, my senior co-author and an outstanding expert in effective models of quantum field theory. I began working with him almost as an apprentice, running numerical calculations of thermodynamic potentials. But very soon we became full collaborators. Together we wrote more than forty papers — and we continue working actively today.

And in truth, this list is almost endless — and perhaps deserves a separate memoir. It would include encounters with Michael Berry and Gerard ’t Hooft, and Professors Shuryak, Shovkovy, Zhitnitsky…

What is worth saying here is simple: the scientific worldview that traces back to Newton is, for the most part, still a craft — in the best sense of the word. And it is passed on, at least partially, from person to person.

Can you learn physics from books? Absolutely.

Can you become a scientist only from books? I have not yet met such an example.