Colloquia Archive 2012

There are 100,000 hair fibres on a typical head of hair, hence calculating perceived properties like 'volume' and compressibility are problems in statistical physics. To address this, a density functional theory for the distribution of hair in a fibre assembly has been developed, treating individual elements as elastic filaments ...

Tests of the Standard Model and searches for new phenomena at the Large Hadron Collider depend heavily on computer simulations of signal and background processes. Monte Carlo event generators aim to simulate the final states of high-energy collisions in full detail, down to the level of individual stable particles. The ...

The inflationary universe scenario has dominated theoretical cosmology for three decades. However, it has major limitations. What preceded inflation? How do we reconcile the fine tuning of initial conditions and parameters required by inflation, with the dark energy now observed, within a single theoretical framework? Are we forced to adopt ...

We review properties of several entanglement characteristics and study their implications, emphasizing distinctions between continuous and discrete quantities. As an example of a continuous characteristic, we look at the entanglement entropy and show that a no-gravitational collapse condition on a pure state in quantum mechanics is sufficient to exclude faster-than-area-law ...

A new particle has been discovered at the LHC on July 4th and it furiously looks the long sought-after Higgs boson. This discovery is only the first step towards a more complete understanding of the dynamics that makes the weak interactions so different from the ordinary electromagnetism and incidentally allows ...