Graduate Study in the Mathematical Physics Group

If you are fascinated by the mathematical beauty of physical theories, we invite you to apply to join our group as a graduate student and share our excitement.

If you would like to know how to apply for admission as a graduate student you should check out the University's Graduate Study pages where you can download the application form. There are various possibilities of funding including EPSRC, PPARC and University scholarships.

Once you are one of our graduate students you will benefit from the congenial atmosphere which characterizes our group.

You will choose one of our members of staff as your supervisor who guides your research work. In addition there will be two more members of staff who keep themselves informed about your research and who together make up your thesis advisory panel. You can find out more about the formal side of being a graduate student here on the departmental postgraduate study pages.

For you, more important than these formal arrangements will be the personal interactions within our group. You will have plenty of opportunity for informal conversations during our morning or afternoon coffee breaks. These take place at 11:00 and 16:00 in G/109, a room with Physics Seminarcomfortable chairs but also with a blackboard if you feel the urge to discuss research.

Twice a week, on Tuesday lunchtimes (1315) and Thursday afternoons (1615), we hold our very relaxed seminars in the cofffee room. We often have outside speakers on Thursdays but there remain plenty of free slots for local speakers and everyone can make suggestions for topics. The seminars are in the "Russian style", which means that the audience can interrupt the speaker with questions and often even longer discussions. It can happen that people from the audience come to the blackboard themselves to discuss a point. And the seminars are open ended; people simply leave when they have heard enough.

We do not run a formal MSc course, but we participate in the MAGIC network of video-conferenced graduate lectures. We also run local short series of lectures on topics of interest. For example, we have had short courses on conformal field theory, the algebraic Bethe Ansatz, string theory and D-branes, the ADHM construction, the coadjoint orbit method, Yangians, and quantum fields in curved spacetime. 

Please take a look at the description of our research areas. One characteristic you will notice is that we stress that much of the beauty of physical theories lies in their mathematical details. We are not content with just the broad brushstrokes.