Colloquia Archive 2024

A black hole is characterised by the fact that nothing can escape - this feature, of a boundary of information that can be accessed from that which cannot, is more general than the spacetime boundary of the event horizon. Horizons can occur in a wide range of physical situations, many of ...

The question of what fundamentally is has never been straightforward in physics, yet there had always been a tentative answer for both theoretical and practical purposes. Everything shifted about a century ago with the advent of quantum mechanics, which challenged our traditional understanding of existence as suddenly we can also ...

The story I am presenting revolves around a strange and unfamiliar to most people geometric construction, which encodes a metric on a manifold into a collection of differential forms on the same manifold. There are many known examples, in diverse dimensions. In three dimensions this coincides with the encoding of ...

I will use a real-time general relativistic Black Hole Flight Similator to show what really happens inside astronomically realistic black holes. The inner horizon of a rotating black hole is the most violent place in the Universe, easily reaching and surpassing energy densities attained in the Big Bang. What does ...

The gravitational-wave signals from merging binary systems carry unique information about the internal structure of compact objects. This is of key interest for neutron stars, whose material is compressed by strong gravity to supra-nuclear densities where novel phases of matter emerge. I will discuss examples of recent progress in the ...

The interiors of Kerr or Reissner-Nordström black holes have "inner" horizons which enclose their singularity and delineate the domain of predictability of all equations of wave equation type -- including the Einstein equations themselves. However, these inner horizons are often classically dynamically unstable and get turned into some sort of singularity ...

I will review recent progress on quantifying complexity of quantum states and operators. After introducing some of the interesting complexity measures, I will discuss what can be learnt from these new tools in quantum many-body systems and quantum field theories.

Ultra-intense laser interactions with matter give us a route to produce some of the most extreme conditions on earth. When these lasers are focused onto solid material, the electric fields associated with the laser are so strong that the atoms in the material become readily ionised to create plasma. These ...

In 1986, Kardar, Parisi and Zhang introduced a model equation for a growing surface, in the form of a nonlinear partial differential equation with noise[1]. In the original paper they applied a dynamical renormalization group analysis to demonstrate its universal nature, which is one of the first identified non-equilibrium ...