After visiting a few colleges, I felt Emma
was the one in which I felt most welcome
Professor Alexander Mitov
MSc (Sofia) PhD (Sofia) MSc (Rochester) PhD (Rochester)
Official Fellow; Director of Studies in Natural Sciences (Biological and Physical)
Professor of Theoretical Physics
Biography
Born in the land of the mythical and enigmatic Thracians, Alexander (Alex) Mitov received his Master's degree in Physics from Bulgaria’s oldest national university, named after St. Clement of Ohrid - a IX-th century Bulgarian scholar, prolific writer and translator, often linked with the invention and popularization of the Cyrillic alphabet.
Upon graduating from Sofia University, Alex was offered one of only two national scholarship awards that supported young Bulgarian researchers in the field of Mathematical Physics. A couple of years later he received a research fellowship from the University of Rochester in Rochester, NY, which offered him the opportunity to pursue research directly related to elementary particle colliders, such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland.
He obtained his MA and PhD degrees in four years, working with three different groups on independent research topics. Upon graduation, he accepted the offer of Kirill Melnikov, a prominent young scientist, to join his team as a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Hawaii. It was in this tropical paradise that Alex became acquainted with the spirit of Aloha, the beauty of the endless Pacific, the thrill of surfing, and managed to write several papers that led to the subsequent derivation of one of last decade’s strongest constraints on the possible existence of Physics beyond the Standard Model, which has so far proved so elusive. To date, this work of his has been cited close to 700 times.
Subsequently, Alex received a Humboldt Fellowship and the Inaugural LHC Theory Initiative Fellowship from the USA, both of which presented him with the opportunity to pursue independent research and join forces with some of the leading research centres in Germany and in the US. He was then offered a 3-year fellowship at CERN to continue his work on the top quark, at that time among the least-known elementary particles. It was at CERN where Alex’s innovative projects came to fruition and he, together with his long-time close collaborator Michael Czakon, published one of the most anticipated works in collider physics. His groundbreaking papers on top-quark physics have the distinction of several ‘first-ever’ attached to them.
Going beyond these purely theoretical breakthroughs, Alex’s scientific results have empowered experimental collaborations at the LHC by offering new, qualitatively different tools. By now his work has been utilized by these collaborations in their extensive searches for Physics beyond the Standard Model and in their attempts to clarify with ever-increasing precision the ultimate validity of the fundamental laws of physics, as embodied in the Standard Model of the Elementary Particles.
Research
He is a member of the High Energy Physics Group