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Peter Ware Higgs (1929-2024)

Peter Ware Higgs passed away peacefully at home following a short illness on 8th April 2024. Peter was born on 29th May 1929 in Newcastle. He studied Theoretical Physics at Kings College London and gained his PhD in 1954. He was appointed Lecturer in Mathematical Physics at the University of Edinburgh in 1960 and became Professor of Theoretical Physics in 1980. In 1964 he published a paper proposing a mechanism for how particles acquire mass. Key to this mechanism was a particle that subsequently became known as the Higgs Boson. Some 50 years later, CERN announced the discovery of this particle in 2012 and the Nobel Prize for Physics was jointly awarded to Francois Englert and Peter Higgs in 2013. Peter was a modest man, yet he inspired generations of students and researchers at the University of Edinburgh and around the world.

The Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics was established in 2012 by the University of Edinburgh to seek answers to fundamental questions about the universe. We do this by creating opportunities for researchers and students from around the world to come together to formulate new theoretical concepts, taking us beyond the limitations of current paradigms.

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Subtleties in decoherence and squeezing of cosmological perturbationsChon MAN SOU

We revisit the cosmological perturbations in minimal single-field inflation, focusing on subtleties arising from total time derivatives (boundary terms) in their action and the corresponding slow-roll unsuppressed phase in the wave functional. While these total derivatives do not contribute to field correlators, they can significantly influence processes related to momentum-space ...
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Theory precision for collider explorationsLaura REINA

Precision physics has played a crucial role in the history of particle physics, often providing indirect evidence for particles that have been later on discovered. Current experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are stress testing the Standard Model and probing new physics with great precision through a multitude of ...

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First Quantisation for Physics in Strong Fields

Overview First quantised, or worldline, approaches to QFT are growing in popularity, not least due to recent successes in the areas of QFT in strong fields, and in the amplitudes-based approach to the classical 2-body problem in gravitation. Moreover, the worldline formalism has a long history of providing non-perturbative information ...
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Solar Scalars – Novel ChannelsAnne DAVIS

Light scalar particles are thought to play a role in cosmology, either as dark matter or dark energy candidates. If they couple to photons they could be emitted by stars, including our sun. I will first Introduce particular theoretical models of such light scalar fields and then discuss whether or ...
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Emergent Patterns in Physics: From Equations to Particles and the CosmosAndrei CONSTANTIN

This colloquium examines three examples of emergent patterns in physics. First, we investigate the statistical regularities found in the distribution of mathematical operators within the equations of physics, which point towards an underlying structure governing physical laws. Next, we explore how advanced computational techniques, such as neural networks and genetic ...
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