Colloquia Archive 2020

The LHC has not yet found any significant deviation from the Standard Model at large energies and thus, indirect high-precision searches for signatures of physics beyond the Standard Model at low energies become more and more important. For any quantity involving the strong nuclear force, the only known approach for ...

The strong force is governed by the elegant mathematical framework of quantum chromodynamics (QCD). The building blocks of QCD are quarks and gluons, and the interactions of these constituents lead to a rich variety of observed phenomena, from the basic properties of nuclei to the production of heavy elements in ...

Molecular clouds are the densest regions of gas in galaxies, in which localised gravitational collapse leads to the formation of stars. I will present an overview of the theory of how molecular clouds form in galaxies, and show how simulations demonstrate the regimes over which different theoretical models apply. I ...

Black holes have a temperature and an associated entropy. This thermodynamic entropy is equal to the area of their horizon. Surprisingly, black holes have a second entropy, a von Neuman, fine grained, or quantum entropy which is given by the area of another surface. This entropy formula can be generalized ...

Neutrinos are the only known elementary particles that are Majorana fermion candidates, implying that they would be their own antiparticles. The most sensitive and perhaps only practical probe of the Majorana nature of neutrinos is an extremely rare nuclear decay process, the double beta decay without the emission of neutrinos ...

Hyper-velocity stars are interesting objects that were first theoretically proposed by Richard Hills as products of interaction of a binary star and a supermassive black hole, that leads to the star being ejected out the galaxy with the speed of hundreds and thousands of km/s. About 15 years ago ...

While traditional fluids only flow when acted upon, a remarkable class of biomaterials spontaneously flow by means of their own internal energy. These “active fluids” comprise a wide range of biological systems that bridge between biological and condensed matter systems. This Brown Bag talk will focus on the example of ...

Imagine a 1D curve, then use it to fill a 2D manifold that covers an arbitrary 3D object – this computationally intensive materials challenge has been realized in the ancient technology known as knitting. This process for making functional materials 2D materials from 1D portable cloth dates back to prehistory, with ...

Searches for extrasolar planets have shown that planetary systems are not just common, but that they exhibit a broad and mostly unanticipated diversity of architectures. In this talk I will discuss how we can use machine learning methods to better characterize observed systems of close-in planets, and review what we ...

The field of laser-matter interaction traditionally deals with the response of atoms, molecules, and plasmas to an external light wave. However, the recent sustained technological progress is opening up the possibility of employing intense laser radiation to trigger or substantially influence physical processes beyond atomic-physics energy scales. Available optical laser ...

More than eighty years after the muon was first discovered, it is still a source of mystery. Indeed, experiments are underway that use muons as a window to search for new physics — a central goal of the high energy physics community. These efforts build on the tantalizing tension between experiment ...

A central challenge is to be able to predict functional properties of a protein from its sequence, and thus (i) discover new proteins with specific functionality and (ii) better understand the functional effect of genomic mutations. Experimental breakthroughs in our ability to read and write DNA allows data on the ...

Abstract: This talk will introduce the use of geometric ideas in the characterisation and analysis of tangled biophysical systems. It will introduce the construction of idealised tangled structures using ideas of both symmetry and homotopy of tangled lines on surfaces. These structures provide an extensive set of tangling motifs for ...

Cosmology is famously an observational rather than an experimental science. No experimentalists were present in the early universe, and the birth and subsequent evolution of the universe cannot be repeated. Instead, we can only measure the spatial correlations between cosmological structures at late times. A central challenge of modern cosmology ...

As humans, how does memory of our past experiences affect our future choices? Are there psychological biases which might cause us to behave less rationally than we think? Can we make mathematical predictions about such situations? And what does this all this have to do with theoretical physics research into ...

Cosmic structure forms hierarchically through smooth accretion and dark matter halo mergers. As a consequence, all galaxies are the product of the dozens of mergers over billions of years. However, one can ask, "What were the first stars and galaxies in the universe?" I will review the current state-of-the-art simulations ...

Turbulence is an ubiquitous phenomenon in fluid flows. Yet, calculating its statistical properties, and in particular what is generically called intermittency effects, remains an open issue. In this talk, I will focus on isotropic and homogeneous fully developed turbulence in incompressible flows. While much effort has been devoted to characterising ...

More information and registration on the Eventbrite page here.

Abstract: Particle physics is often equated with high energy collider experiments. However, over recent years it has become increasingly clear that high intensity and high precision experiments offer significant, complementary opportunities to explore for physics beyond the Standard Model. In this talk we will look at a range of these ...