Thursday 16th October, 3.30pm: 'The Lightest Black Hole (in 2+1 D)'
by Jamie Parsons (3rd year Maths)
"It is possible to construct a massless black hole by taking a null orbifold
of the AdS3 manifold. I will discuss the closed string spectrum on this
space and the possibility of tachyons appearing."
Talk given at the Twenty-Second Meeting of the North British Mathematical Physics Seminar
Thursday 23rd October, 3.30pm: 'Symmetries and Asymmetries of B to K*mu+mu- Decays in the Standard Model and Beyond' by Aoife Bharucha (3rd year Physics)
"The rare decay B to K*mu+mu- is regarded as one of the crucial channels for B physics as the polarization of the K* allows a precise angular reconstruction resulting in many observables that offer new important tests of the Standard Model and its extensions. These angular
observables can be expressed in terms of CP-conserving symmetries and
CP-violating asymmetries which we study in
terms of the full form factors calculated from QCD sum
rules on the light-cone, including QCD factorization
corrections.
We show that, to leading-twist accuracy, our set of form
factors fulfil all relations predicted by SCET.
We investigate all symmetries and asymmetries in the context of the
Standard Model and various New Physics models, in particular SUSY and
the Little-Higgs model with T-parity,
identifying those with small to moderate dependence on hadronic
quantities and
large impact of new physics. One important result of our studies
is that new CP-violating phases will produce clean signals in
CP-violating asymmetries."
Based on the paper 'Symmetries and Asymmetries of B -> K* mu+ mu- Decays in the Standard Model and Beyond' by Wolfgang Altmannshofer, Patricia Ball, Aoife Bharucha, Andrzej J. Buras, David M. Straub, Michael Wick
Wednesday 29th October, 2.30pm: 'Double Bubbles and Domain Walls' by Mike Gillard (2nd year Maths)
Wednesday 5th November, 2.15pm: 'The Nature of Space - Higher levels of symmetry, new types of rotation (groups), higher dimensional forms of complex numbers - a radically different view from the usual' by Dennis Morris (MSc student)
Wednesday 12th November, 2.15pm: 'Seiberg Duality' by James Barnard (2nd year Maths)
Seiberg duality (James Barnard)
"Seiberg duality is a useful tool in supersymmetric gauge theories. I
will provide an explanation of the duality, why we should believe in
it and how we might go about extending the concept. I've tried to
minimise the amount of jargon and equations so it will hopefully be
accessible to all."
Slides (.ppt)
Kasner metric (Angharad Kenway)
Wednesday 26th November, 2.15pm: 'N-Body Simulations and Models for Dark Energy' by Elise Jennings (2nd year Physics, IPPP/ICC) Slides (.pdf)
Thursday 4th December, 3.30pm: 'Bouncing Geodesics in the Mixmaster Universe' by Angharad Kenway (2nd year Maths)
"In this talk I will introduce the Kasner metric and the Mixmaster
Universe. These spacetimes have a singularity at t=0 and I will be
discussing whether spacelike geodesics can bounce away from this
singularity."
Wednesday 21st January, 2.15pm: 'Neutrino Phenomenology: Oscillations and Non-Standard Interactions' by Tracey Li (2nd year Physics)
"This talk will be an introduction into the phenomenology of neutrino
oscillation experiments: the theory behind them, the way they work, and
what we can learn from the results. Besides measuring neutrino
oscillations, there has recently been a lot of interest in using these
experiments to detect 'non-standard interactions' (flavour-changing lepton
interactions) which are predicted by several Beyond the Standard Model
theories."
Slides (.pdf)
Wednesday 28th January, 2.15pm: 'Smashing Particles at the Large Hadron Collider' (sneak preview of Ustinov Café Scientifique presentation) by Callum Durnford, Chris Orme and Sophy Palmer (3rd year Physics)
What's a Café Scientifique? Some students from the IPPP are involved with the Junior Cafe Scientifique project, visiting local schools to engage with students in discussions about interesting extra-curricular physics topics. Visit Sophy and Callum's Junior Cafe Scientifique page to see what they get up to.
Wednesday 4th February: No seminar, due to the Higgs-Maxwell Workshop in Edinburgh.
Wednesday 18th February, 2.15pm: 'SUSY and R-symmetry breaking in ISS+ models' by Luis Matos (2nd year Physics)
"I will discuss the properties of some O'Raifeartaigh models inspired by the
construction of Intriligator, Seibery and Shih. I will start by motivating their
idea of metastable SUSY breaking and give two particular examples: ISS + baryon and
ISS + meson."
Thursday 26th February, 3.30pm: 'Topological Solitons and D-branes' by Jonathan Powell (2nd year Maths)
"I'll talk about topological solitons and D-branes! It will just be
a gentle introduction and overview of the concept of topological
solitons, and then some cool stuff about how D-branes can tell us
about these soliton solutions."
Wednesday 11th March, 2.15pm: 'Extracting spacetimes using the AdS/CFT conjecture' by Sam Bilson (3rd year Maths)
"I present analytic methods for extracting a class of bulk
geometries given information of certain physical quantities in the
boundary CFT. More specifically I look at singular correlators and
entanglement entropy in the CFT to provide information of null geodesics
and minimal surfaces repectively in the bulk."
Based on the paper 'Extracting spacetimes using the AdS/CFT conjecture ' by Samuel Bilson
Thursday 19th March, 3.30pm: 'Top production processes at hadron colliders' by Paul Mellor (2nd year Physics) Slides (.pps)
Friday 24th April, 3.15pm: 'Theory vs. Experiment in Our Generation' by Philip Tanedo (Cornell University)
"For the past 35 years, our field has been ruled by the hegemony of the
Standard Model while we have grasped for hints of new physics. Every
particle physicist in the world is now looking forward to the "era of the
LHC" as a time when our field will be reinvigorated with new data, but how
can we best prepare ourselves for such data given the drought of new physics
over the past two generations? This talk will be a non-technical discussion
of what it means to be a phenomenology postgrad in the 21st century. We'll
briefly discuss the CDF multi-muon signal and the PAMELA/ATIC anomaly as
examples of how "the game has changed" in high energy physics. At any rate,
it'll be a short talk and there should be nice biscuits. Get there before Jamie eats all the good ones."
Slides (.pdf)
Theory vs Experiment (Flip Tanedo). From XKCD.com
Wednesday 6th May, 2.15pm: 'Sector Decomposition' by Jon Carter (2nd year Physics)
"Sector decomposition is a constructive method to isolate divergences from
parameter integrals occurring in perturbative QFT. I will explain the
general algorithm in detail with reference to loop integrals, and discuss
application to infrared divergent phase-space integrals over real
radiation matrix elements." Slides (.pdf)
Thursday 4th June, 3.30pm: 'Black Holes, Thermodynamics and Vortices' by Luke Barclay (2nd year Maths)
"I will begin with a very brief introduction to the path integral
approach to quantum gravity and its relevance to black hole
thermodynamics. Then we will look at the Abelian Higgs vortex and its
gravitational characteristics. Next, we will see how the presence of a
vortex on a black hole affects the thermodynamics of the system.
Finally we shall look at how the findings of this research may affect
other research in the field."
Thursday 11th June, 3.30pm: 'Calculating Correlation Functions in AdS/CFT' by Danny Brattan (1st year Maths)
"In recent years the AdS/CFT correspondence has been recognised as
one of the key predictions of string theory. In this talk I hope to indicate
the origin of the correspondence and show how it can be used to calculate
correlation functions of strongly coupled conformal field theories." Slides (.pdf)
Thursday 2nd July, 3.30pm: 'Chiral SUSY Breaking' by James Barnard (2nd year Maths)
"Recent work by Intriligator, Seiberg and Shih has provided a simple
method for SUSY breaking in which the SUSY breaking vacuum is not the
true groundstate. We ask whether their method can be extended to
stable, rather than metastable, SUSY breaking. It turns out models
with some degree of chirality are good candidates."