Particle.news
Download on the App Store

IISc Physicists Tie Ramanujan’s 1/π Series to Logarithmic Conformal Field Theories

A peer‑reviewed PRL study shows the century‑old formulas arise naturally in these models, enabling faster calculations for specific theoretical quantities.

Overview

  • Researchers Aninda Sinha and Faizan Bhat at IISc’s Centre for High Energy Physics report the finding in Physical Review Letters in December 2025.
  • Ramanujan’s 1/π series emerge within logarithmic conformal field theories, a framework used to describe scale-invariant systems at criticality.
  • The team demonstrated computational gains for selected quantities in these theories, with potential to inform work on percolation, turbulence and aspects of black hole descriptions.
  • Ramanujan listed 17 highly efficient 1/π series in 1914, a legacy that underpins modern algorithms such as Chudnovsky used to compute roughly 200 trillion digits of π.
  • The study was motivated by the question of why Ramanujan’s extraordinary formulas exist, seeking a physics-based origin for their structure.