Events Archive 2024

Let me celebrate the end of the term by offering you a 30-minute crash summary of the course on kinetic theory for self-gravitating systems which I have just finished teaching. Mathematically speaking, self-gravitating systems and plasmas are very much alike - and we will discuss why and how. In the last ...

Michal Tomaszewski graduated with an MPhys in Mathematical Physics from Edinburgh in 2014, followed by a PhD from Cambridge University in 2018. At Cambridge Michal worked on developing a novel photoacoustic imaging technique for measurement of blood vasculature in cancer tumors. His postdoctoral training took him to Moffitt Cancer Center ...

In this talk I will give a pedagogical introduction to lattice models in statistical mechanics with a particular focus on algebraic techniques for computation. The main protagonist in this story is the transfer matrix which provides a computational formalism amenable to a mathematical deconstruction. We will see that the transfer ...

The next generation of galaxy surveys (Euclid, The Vera Rubin Observatory, DESi, DES) will be providing us with highly precise measurements of the cosmological galaxy distribution. In order to extract the most cosmological and gravitational information from these measurements, our theoretical models need to be equally accurate. While the standard ...

Alison graduated from Edinburgh University with a BSc in Mathematical Physics, and a Master of Engineering degree in Petroleum Engineering from Heriot Watt University. She then held various operational positions with Schlumberger in the Far East, USA, Norway and France, and later several global, senior technology and managerial positions in ...

Classical/Quantum information and computation provide a transversal perspective on many aspects of science, including gravitational physics. We shall take a bird’s-eye view on a survey of topics where these disciplines attempt to feed insights into each other, extending the well-known relations within thermodynamics.

The AdS/CFT correspondence currently stands unrivalled as our most complete realisation of the holographic principle. Despite its numerous successes, the story is still far from over - intrinsic questions aside, AdS is a very special spacetime, and any holographic implications we could draw may likewise be restricted. The call for ...

In this talk, I will provide an overview of the idea of quantum complexity, which measures the minimum number of simple operations required to achieve a given task. I will particularly talk about the geometrical formulation of complexity, developed by Nielsen and his collaborators, which provides an elegant way of ...

I'll talk a bit about why you may (and should) be interested in quantum groups, and how cluster algebras help study them. Perhaps, some integrable systems will also make their way into this talk (they often do).

First introduced in 2009, Lagrangian multiforms provide a variational framework for describing integrable hierarchies using a generalised variational principle applied to an appropriate generalisation of a classical action. In this talk, I will give an overview of this framework and report some recent results based on joint works with V ...

The double copy is a powerful tool connecting gauge theoretic and gravitational scattering amplitudes. It was originally derived from string theory, relating the tree level amplitudes of closed string amplitudes to two copies of open string amplitudes. In the field theory limit, this reduces to being able to obtain tree-level ...

Category theory and representation theory are branches of mathematics concerned with very general collections of objects and how to transform – i.e. exhibit symmetries – between them. There is a recent upsurge of interest from the physics community in the role of categorical representation theory to capture the topological symmetries of ...

The purpose of this talk would be to give a pedagogical introduction to composition algebras, superalgebras, and finally super-composition algebras. Hurwitz’s celebrated theorem states that there can be only seven composition algebras over the field of real numbers, namely the real numbers, the complex numbers, the quaternions, the octonions ...

In the computation of Feynman integrals divergences are common. To make sense of the divergent integral we employ a regulator so we can manipulate a well defined object. Many regulators are available and have various pros and cons. One of the most common choices is dimensional regularization where we analytically ...

Category theorists love pointing at some important concept from another branch of mathematics or science and saying "it's just a ...", where the rest of the sentence will involve some word like "universal", "functor" or "adjoint". This can be clarifying for both the subject at hand and its relationship with ...

At early times, the universe was an almost perfectly uniform plasma of elementary particles in almost perfect thermal equilibrium. Then, at a later point, it "came alive" (at least in one region, on Earth) – it began evolving and learning about itself, first unconsciously and later deliberately. How did that transition ...