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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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The role of the chiral anomaly in polarized deeply inelastic scattering: Topological screening, emergent axion-like dynamics and sphaleron transitions in QCD at high energies.—Raju VENUGOPALAN

The contrast between the simplicity of the QCD Lagrangian, and its emergent subtle non-perturbative dynamics, is illustrated for the cross-section for a simple process, the scattering of a polarized virtual photon off a polarized proton. This process is sensitive to the net helicity of quarks in the proton and, as ...
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Which came first: supermassive black holes or galaxies?—Joe SILK

Insights from JWST observations are shedding new light on the chronology and nature of AGN in the context of early galaxy evolution. I argue that AGN feedback evolved from a short-lived, high redshift phase when relatively dense momentum-conserving central outflows in dusty ultracompact galaxy hosts stimulated vigorous early star formation ...

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Counting microstates of black holes—Vijay BALASUBRAMANIAN

On the basis of general relativity and quantum mechanics in curved spacetimes, Bekenstein and Hawking proposed that black holes behave as thermodynamic objects carrying an entropy S = A / 4 G, where A is the area of the event horizon and G is Newton's constant. This remarkable formula is universal ...

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Scottish Soft Matter Workshop

Soft condensed matter encompasses a wide variety of industrial, biological and fundamental research questions regarding materials that are able to deform under mechanical stress. The complexity of these material systems arises from their duality as partially solid-like and partially fluid-like, as well as the significant role played by thermal fluctuations ...
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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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