Academic Career and Research Areas

Prof. Alim's (*1981) field of research is the area of quantum geometry, where mathematical structures are developed which describe problems of quantization of physical systems and their dualities using methods from complex algebraic geometry, representation theory and number theory. He is particularly interested in studying the interplay of perturbative and non-perturbative physical structures using resurgence techniques in the context of topological string theory, mirror symmetry and BPS structures of supersymmetric theories.

Prof. Alim studied mathematics and physics in Karlsruhe, the ENS in Paris as well as at the LMU where he obtained his PhD in mathematical physics in 2009. He was a postdoc at the Hausdorff Center for Mathematics in Bonn, then in the physics and mathematics departments at Harvard before moving back to Germany to lead an Emmy Noether group in Hamburg. He became an associate professor for mathematical physics at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh in 2024 and was appointed to the professorship for quantum geometry at TUM in 2025.

Awards

  • Independent Emmy Noether research group grant of German Research Foundation (2016)
  • Recipient of PhD Prize of the Arnold Sommerfeld Center for Theoretical Physics, LMU (2010)
  • PhD with distinction Summa Cum Laude (2009)

"Mathematical structures of non-perturbative topological string theory: from GW to DT invariants". arXiv:2109.06878 with A. Saha, J. Teschner and Iván Tulli, Communications in Mathematical Physics, volume 399, pages 1039–1101 (2023).

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"Intrinsic nonperturbative topological strings" arXiv: 2102.07776. Accepted in Advances in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics.

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"Parabolic Higgs bundles, tt* connections and opers" arXiv:1911.06652 with F. Beck and L. Fredrickson. Asian Journal of Mathematics, volume 26, Number 4 (2022).

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"Airy Equation for the Topological String Partition Function in a Scaling Limit" arXiv:1506.01375, Letters in Mathematical Physics, June 2016, Volume 106, Issue 6, pp 719-729 with S.T. Yau and J. Zhou.

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"Algebraic structure of tt* equations for Calabi-Yau sigma models" arXiv:1412.3454, Communications in Mathematical Physics, August 2017, Volume 353, Issue 3, pp 963-1003.

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