What student seminars are all about...
Student seminars are usually held on Monday afternoons, 5-6pm, in OC218 (the IPPP seminar room). Tea, coffee and biscuits are provided by the IPPP.
Feel free to invite a friend or collaborator from another institution to give a talk if they're in town.
Organisers: Oliver Hall (Physics) and Simon Gentle (Maths)
The quark-gluon plasma (QGP) is one of the best models to understand the properties of the microseconds-old universe. In this talk, I will focus on the drag force arising in the strongly coupled QGP in the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence. Slides (.pdf)14 February 2011: Feynman Topologies at NNLO QCD
Feynman diagram calculations at next-to-next-to leading order can get messy. I will describe the general structures present at NNLO, and introduce a technique to deal with multiple topologies in an automated fashion.7 February 2011: Response from probing black holes
Retarded Green's functions tell us how a system responds to external probes. They are hard to compute for a strongly-coupled theory with a non-trivial density matrix. In this talk I will show how this problem can be reduced to solving wave equations in black hole backgrounds using the AdS/CFT correspondence. Slides (.pdf)24 January 2011: Neutron Stars: A Skyrmion Model
Skyrmions have been shown to be a good model of small nuclei but can this be extended to model something as large as a neutron star? Slides (.pdf)13 December 2010: The Mixmaster Universe Code? Fractals, Fibonacci and the Golden Ratio
After a brief introduction to the chaotic nature of the Mixmaster Universe, I will outline some interesting mathematical features found in the evolution of the parameters of this model. These incorporate some interesting (and popular) areas of mathematics including the Fibonacci numbers and fractals.6 December 2010: TBA
The hunt for the Higgs continues, this time using jet substructure. They'll be a brief review of everyone's favourite - a subtraction scheme and then hold onto your hats for a discussion of jet techniques.29 November 2010: Introduction to QCD Sum Rules in Flavour Physics
I will give a brief introduction to the technique of QCD Sum Rules in the context of Flavour Physics. Remember, some sum rules rule. (Pun courtesy of Peter B.)22 November 2010: Antenna subtraction in pQCD at NNLO
We consider the effective field theory in D=4 obtained from a stack of three D-branes coincident in the transverse space with open strings permitted to end on any D-brane in the stack and involving massless fermions. Such a theory is interesting for several reasons. Although not a supersymmetric theory, the leading order amplitudes display effective unbroken N=1 supersymmetry which is broken at loop level; yet the one loop amplitudes can also be constructed as a sum over N=4,N=1 and scalar loop amplitudes. Despite the elevated levels of symmetry this theory is complicated by the gauge group, SU(3); it being large enough to produce non-abelian interactions yet not large enough to neglect non-planar contributions. As well as long range confinement and the existence of a non-trivial vacuum topology there are many aspects of this theory that are beautiful and surprising. Perhaps most surprising is it's success in predicting a huge range of phenomena involving hadronic matter; predictions which have been verified experimentally with increasing accuracy for over forty years. With the LHC producing the latest wave of experiemntal tests this theory is under new scrutiny with more accurate predictions needed for new physics searches as well as better Standard Model analysis. We introduce the "Antenna Subtraction" method as a means of extracting singularity free NNLO accurate observables relevant for the LHC.15 November 2010: Q-balls in the false vacuums
Ronseal. Q-balls are somewhat generic features in models with a metastable vacuum supporting a global U(1) symmetry. I will discuss some of their properties, including how they can precipitate phase transitions to the true ground state.1 November 2010: Lifshitz holography
The most common example of holography is the AdS/CFT correspondence, relating classical gravity calculations to relativistic gauge theories in the large colour limit. However, not every system for which we wish to construct a dual has the Lorentz group as a symmetry. In this talk I will describe holographic duals to field theories with a non-relativistic scaling symmetry ("Lifshitz symmetry") and the subtleties associated with defining stress-tensors etc. for these theories.25 October 2010: FKS subtraction
I will discuss Next to Leading order QCD calculations and outline the FKS method (Frixione, Kunszt, Signer) for the computation of NLO QCD cross sections.18 October 2010: Multiple M2-branes and supergravity backgrounds
I will give an overview of recent developments in our understanding of multiple coincident M2-branes, and how this picture can be extended to include background fields from supergravity. I'll begin with a description of multiple D-branes in string theory and show how this is generalised to M-theory with the introduction of some novel algebraic structures. The multiple M2-brane action can be reduced to obtain the multiple D2-brane action and using this technique we can examine the possible couplings to background fields in M-theory by requiring they produce the correct terms in the D2-action. Slides (.pdf)
Links to previous years' seminars: 2009/2010, 2008/2009
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What student seminars are all about...