Events Archive 2026

Event Cancelled

All the (interesting) elements are created via nuclear fusion in stars; on the main sequence where evolution is slow over millions or billions of years, or during their dramatic death throes. I will provide an overview of star formation, evolution, and galactic chemical evolution, aiming to cover the full life ...

Heavy particle effective theory applied to spinning black holes provides a natural framework in which propagators linearize and numerators exponentiate. In this talk, I will exploit these two features to introduce Kerr generating functions, which describe the scattering of any probe on a Kerr black hole background to all loop ...

Computing correlators is hard. Computing correlators on a curved background is harder. Going to higher point function gets even harder as the number of integrals increase. However, using recursion relations one can play LEGOs with the Feynman diagrams. The higher point diagrams can be written as gluing of lower point ...

It is well-known that physicists are amazing at computing two seemingly different things: geometries satisfying some gravitational equations of motion and scattering amplitudes. As physical objects, amplitudes encode quantum behaviour. However, over the last decade, significant effort has gone into understanding their classical limits and associated observables. While having a ...

Feynman graphs (or diagrams) and their associated Feynman Integrals are the building blocks of perturbative Quantum Field Theory, and thus serve as a basis for Standard model theory predictions for experiments such as the LHC. The higher the precision required the more complicated the integrals become. But their mathematical properties ...

Eoin moved to Edinburgh from Ireland in 2016 for a PhD in Theoretical and Computational Physics with Richard Blythe and Martin Evans, studying the differential equations behind bird flocking and how flocks turn. He also co-lead outreach activities for his Centre for Doctoral Training, developing skills that have helped him ...

The notion of classical physics is usually thought of as that of long-distance, low-energy physics that is described by a set of PDEs rather than a path integral. Furthermore, the complexity of a given problem is usually expected to increase with the number of degrees of freedom. It was therefore ...

If a finite group G acts on a complex vector space V then the set of orbits V/G is naturally an affine variety. It is almost always singular. Beginning with my PhD work, I've always been interested in resolutions of these singular spaces. I'll explain what a ...

Say you have a genus-2 surface and a diffeomorphism of that surface to itself, then you can make a 3-manifold by crossing that surface with the unit interval to form a “cylinder” and then use the diffeomorphism to glue one end of the cylinder to the other. Thurston showed that ...

In this talk, I will provide a pedagogical introduction to T\overline{T} deformations of conformal field theories (CFTs)- broadly speaking, these constitute a class of interesting, yet solvable, irrelevant perturbations of arbitrary (two-dimensional) CFTs. After motivating why one should be interested in such constructions, I will outline relevant field-theoretic ...

For my research day job, I solve differential equations on computers. I do this by appropriating many of the special functions of mathematical physics to keep track of all kinds of information in numerical form. But looking at the inner workings of those functions leads to the striking observation: spherical ...

Quantum field theory is one of the great achievements of modern physics, allowing for precise predictions of observables measured at particle colliders. But man shall not live by amplitudes on trivial backgrounds alone. In this talk I will aim to give an introduction to background field theories. For scattering in ...