| Birth Place: | Budapest, Hungary |
| Nationality: | Hungarian, German |
| Field: | Theoretical Particle Physics |
| Alma Mater: | Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, Hungary |
| Known For: | Numerical Quantum Field Theory, Lattice QCD |
Zoltan Fodor is a Hungarian-German theoretical particle physicist, best known for his works in lattice quantum chromodynamics.
Fodor was born in 1964 in Budapest, Hungary. At high school and at university he won several national competitions in mathematics, physics and chemistry. He did his undergraduate studies at the Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, where he received his PhD in 1990. He was postdoctoral fellow at DESY in Hamburg, CERN in Geneva[1] and KEK in Tsukuba.
In 1998 he became a professor at the Lorand Eotvos University, Budapest, Hungary.In 2003 he moved to the University of Wuppertal in Germany.[2] In 2020 he moved to Pennsylvania State University in the United States.[3]
Fodor is widely known for his results in lattice QCD. Manyof his findings represent the first fully controlled latticecalculations using ab-initio quantum chromodynamics and quantum electrodynamics.
In 2000 he proposed a method.[4] to circumvent thesign problem at finite baryonic chemical potentials or densities. Thenumerical sign problem is one of the major unsolved problems in thephysics of many particle systems. In 2006 he determined the natureof the QCD transition in the early universe.[5] Since the transition turnedout to be an analytic one no observable cosmic relics are expected fromthis transition. In a series of papers he also calculated the absolutescale of the QCD transition.[6] The equation of state of the stronglyinteracting matter plays a crucial role both in cosmology and inheavy ion collisions, which he determined in 2010.[7] By calculatingthe topological susceptibility in the early universe at hightemperatures, he gave a prediction for the axion's mass in 2016.Axions are one of the mostly advocated candidates for dark matter.
Since 2005 he has been thespokesperson of the Budapest-Marseille-Wuppertal Collaboration focusingon QCD phenomena at vanishing temperature. In 2008 they determined thelight hadron spectrum, which explains the mass of the visible universe[8] In 2015 the mass difference between the neutron and the proton(and other so-called isospin splittings) were calculated.[9] This 0.14percent neutron-proton mass difference is responsible—among others—for the existence of atoms, as we know them, or for the ignition ofstars. In 2021 they determined the anomalous magnetic dipole moment ofthe muon. This quantity is widely believed to indicate new physicsbeyond the Standard Model. However, the Budapest-Marseille-WuppertalCollaboration obtained a theory-based result[10] agreeing more with theexperimental value than with the previous theory-based value that reliedon the electron-positron annihilation experiments.