Deniz Bozkurt

26 January 2024

Photo: Deniz Bozkurt

Portrait of Deniz Bozkurt.

Deniz Bozkurt, originally from Turkey, completed her master's in mathematical physics in Hamburg, supported by the QU Master Scholarship Program. Her thesis focused on preliminary results obtained on the coordinate Bethe ansatz for spin chains from N=2 Supersymmetric Gauge Theories. Currently, she continues this research at DESY theory group under the guidance of Prof. Dr. Elli Pomoni, with the aim of generalizing her master's thesis results and gaining insights into the dynamics of N=2 theories and spin chain models. Additionally, she is affiliated with the group of Prof. Dr. Gleb Arutyunov at UHH.

What is the topic of your research?

My project is based on the idea that we can map the problem of computing anomalous dimension for certain operators in super-conformal field theories (SCFTs) to the diagonalization of a spin chain Hamiltonian. This program was very helpful for us to understand the dynamics of N=4 Supersymmetric Young-Mills theory (SYM) and some N=1 theories which are related to N=4 SYM. Same logic can be applied to the N=2 SCFTs, although the spin chains models there are not studied in the literature, and they lack some very novel symmetry properties compared to spin chains coming from N=4 SYM. Our goal is to understand the spin chains better by developing a method to exactly diagonalize the Hamiltonians and map the information we obtain there to N=2 theories.

What fascinates you about your research focus?

I am mainly fascinated by how two problems arising from two highly distinct areas of physics—4D gauge field theories and 2-dimensional lattice models—can be so interconnected. And this way I am challenged by two problems at once, which is very exciting.

What do you like about the cluster Quantum Universe?

Since I was a master student, I always enjoyed the QU lectures and the QU-days. The number of events QU provides can sometimes be overwhelming, but I appreciate the variety of interesting research topics they cover, and the social connections are kept alive very nicely.

What do you like to do in your free time?

I was always writing short stories and poems in Turkish. After my undergraduate studies I focused on prose poetry. Nowadays I am rarely finding time and often getting confused whether to write in English. Other than that, I love going to art museums and exhibitions and dancing to Techno or Latin American music.