York has a large and friendly mathematical physics group with a wide range of research interests and an international outlook, with graduate students and researchers from many countries choosing to work here. If you are interested in graduate study or post-doctoral research, please contact the relevant member of staff.
The main areas of research are Quantum Gravity, Quantum Field Theory and Integrable Models, Quantum Information and Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, and Quantum Groups.
Information about the staff members and research fellows, graduate students and visitors in our group.
The group has two seminars every week. These are very lively with many questions and active participation by the graduate students.
You will find links to recent publications of the group from these pages.
Scientists that have visited our group at York.
We invite you to join our group as a graduate student.
Links to events, networks, related research groups, funding bodies, etc.
(in alphabetical order)
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Johannes Biniok MPhys (St Andrews) Foundations of quantum mechanics +44 1904 32 3075 jcgb500@york.ac.uk |
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Dr Henning Bostelmann Dipl. Phys., Dr. rer. nat. (Göttingen); Master of Computer Science (Hagen) Algebraic quantum field theory, operator algebras +44 1904 32 3088 henning.bostelmann@york.ac.uk |
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Thomas Bullock MPhys (Sheffield) Quantum information/foundations +44 1904 32 3075 tjb525@york.ac.uk |
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Professor Paul Busch Dipl.-Phys.(MSc, Cologne), Dr.rer.nat.(Cologne) Quantum mechanics, foundations, quantum measurement and information, quantum theory and relativity. +44 1904 32 3082 paul.busch@york.ac.uk |
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Professor Ed Corrigan MA, PhD (Cantab), FRS Quantum field theory, integrable systems, solitons, defects +44 1904 43 3074 ec9@york.ac.uk |
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Dr Gustav W Delius PhD (Stony Brook) Stochastic Modelling in Mathematical Biology and Theoretical Ecology, Spatial Stochastic Processes, Quantum Field Theory, Integrable Systems, Quantum Groups +44 1904 32 3077 gwd2@york.ac.uk |
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Jacob Dyer +44 1904 32 4153 jpd514@york.ac.uk |
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Matthew Ferguson +44 1904 32 3085 mtf500@york.ac.uk |
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Dr Chris Fewster MA, PhD (Cantab) Mathematical issues in quantum and gravitational physics. Quantum field theory in curved spacetime. Algebraic quantum field theory. +44 1904 32 3091 chris.fewster@york.ac.uk |
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Jos Gibbons +44 1904 32 4153 jg1047@york.ac.uk |
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Dr Eli Hawkins PhD (Penn State, Physics), PhD (Penn State, Mathematics) +44 1904 32 3069 eh555@york.ac.uk |
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Dr Atsushi Higuchi BSc (Tokyo), MSc (Kyoto), PhD (Yale) Quantum field theory, general relativity. +44 1904 32 3089 atsushi.higuchi@york.ac.uk |
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Dr Bernard Kay MA (Cantab), PhD (London) quantum fields, quantum gravity, fundamental problems in quantum theory +44 1904 32 3092 bernard.kay@york.ac.uk |
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Spiros Kechrimparis BSc, MSc (Patras) Quantum Information +44 1904 32 3844 sk864@york.ac.uk |
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Benjamin Lang Diplom (Freiburg) Quantum Field Theory +44 1904 32 3085 bl620@york.ac.uk |
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Umberto Lupo BSc (Warwick), MASt (Cantab) Quantum field theory/quantum gravity +44 1904 32 3085 ul504@york.ac.uk |
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Dr Niall MacKay BA (Cambridge), PhD (Durham) Integrable quantum field theory, quantum groups +44 1904 32 3493 niall.mackay@york.ac.uk |
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Dan McNulty MSci Imperial College Foundations of Quantum Physics and Quantum Information +44 1904 32 3085 dm575@york.ac.uk |
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Professor Evgeni Sklyanin MSc, PhD (Steklov Institute, St Petersburg), FRS Quantum and classical integrable systems, quantum groups +44 1904 32 4162 eks2@york.ac.uk |
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Neil Stevens +44 1904 32 3075 ns695@york.ac.uk |
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Professor Reidun Twarock MSc (Bath), PhD (Clausthal, Germany) Mathematical Biology, Mathematical Physics +44 1904 32 5368 rt507@york.ac.uk |
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James Waldron MSci, MSc Imperial College Quantization, Orbifolds, Poisson Geometry +44 1904 32 3075 jw1026@york.ac.uk |
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Dr Stefan Weigert PD Dr (Basel/CH) quantum foundations and quantum information: mutually unbiased bases, quantum state reconstruction; PT-symmetry +44 1904 32 4152 slow500@york.ac.uk |
This page lists past members of the Mathematical Physics group who have left since summer 2000.
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Stephen Brierley |
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David Bullock |
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Charlie Dyson |
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Matthew Ferguson |
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David Hunt |
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Yen Cheong Lee |
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Leon Loveridge |
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Daniel McNulty |
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Faizal Mir |
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Leonardo Ortiz |
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Vidas Regelskis |
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Adele Taylor |
| Philip Walker Research topics: Quantum electromagnetic radiation in flat and curved spacetimes Supervisor: Atsushi Higuchi Degree: PhD Year: 2009 Tel.: x3075 email: pjw120@york.ac.uk Room: G/A/171 |
The following students graduated recently:
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Paul Butterley |
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William Hall |
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Peter Larkin |
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Lutz Osterbrink |
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Sikarin Yoo-Kong |
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Ko Sanders |
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Lieven Clarisse |
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David Emms |
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Giles Martin |
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Barry Miller |
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Calvin Smith |
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Varqa Abyaneh |
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Joseph Hilling |
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Emily King |
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Simon Dawson
Research topics: Bounds on Negative Energy Densities in Quantum Field Theories on Flat and Curved Spacetimes Supervisor: Chris Fewster Degree: PhD Year: 2004 |
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Jason Szulc
Research topics: Quantum Information and Quantum Computing Supervisor: Tony Sudbery Degree: PhD Year: 2003 |
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Alan George PhD 2004 Supervisor: Gustav W Delius |
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Cristina Zambon PhD 2004 Supervisor: Ed Corrigan |
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Richard Weeks PhD 2004 |
| Ukyo Kono MSc 2004 Supervisor: Niall MacKay |
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Ben Short PhD 2003 Supervisor: Niall MacKay |
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Brett Gibson PhD 2001 Supervisor: Gustav W Delius |
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Spyros Kouris PhD 2001 Supervisor: Atsushi Higuchi |
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Chris Barton PhD 2000 Supervisor: Tony Sudbery |
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Hilary Carteret PhD 2000 Supervisor: Tony Sudbery |
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Stefan Hollands PhD 2000 Supervisor: Bernard Kay |
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Alfredo Calvo-Pereira MSc 2000 Supervisor: Chris Fewster |
Our research subdivides into four main areas, with many overlaps.
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Quantum GravityStaff: C Fewster, A Higuchi, B Kay, E Hawkins, H Bostelmann; |
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Quantum IntegrabilityStaff: E Corrigan FRS; G Delius; N MacKay; E Sklyanin FRS; V Regelskis |
Quantum Information & FoundationsStaff: P Busch, C Fewster, A Higuchi, B Kay, A Sudbery, S Weigert; |
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Quantum GroupsStaff: GW Delius, N MacKay, M Nazarov, E Sklyanin FRS, S Donkin, A Sudbery |
Research in Dynamical Systems is done in the Networks and Nonlinear Dynamics Group.
For other research areas in physics please visit the research pages of the Department of Physics.
The quantum gravity group carries out research on various aspects of quantum gravity as well as on some allied areas of mathematical physics, including certain topics in quantum mechanics and also in classical general relativity. A particular interest of the research group is the subject of quantum field theory in curved spacetime. Our work often makes use of rigorous techniques drawn from functional analysis (e.g. the theory of operators on Hilbert spaces and operator algebras) and other areas of pure mathematics including differential geometry, microlocal analysis and category theory.
While a satisfactory theory of full quantum gravity continues to elude us, the attempt to anticipate some of the properties of such a theory has led to many interesting developments. Especially, Hawking's 1974 prediction of black hole evaporation, which was based on consideration of quantum field theory in curved spacetime, suggests that there must be yet-to-be-discovered deep interconnections between quantum theory, gravity and thermodynamics. More generally, the very existence of the problem of quantum gravity has changed our perspective on each of the separate theories of classical general relativity and quantum field theory and focussed attention on issues (e.g. the problem of singularities in classical general relativity or the problem of locality in quantum field theory) which might be expected to be of relevance for the unification problem. Further, both at the theoretical and experimental/observational level, the two subject areas have now essentially merged, with very-high-energy phenomena believed to have dominated the era just after the big bang and hence to have determined the present structure of the universe.
Recent research by the York group concerns the following issues:
Most forms of classical matter have a positive energy density, a fact closely related to our experience of gravity as an attractive force. However, the situation is very different in quantum field theory, where the energy density can typically be made as negative as we like. Recent work by Fewster has been directed towards developing "quantum energy inequalities" for quantum fields which show (roughly speaking) that the magnitude and duration of negative energy densities are constrained: the energy density cannot be too negative for too long. An introduction to QEIs and some of the related techniques can be found in Fewster's lecture notes.
Higuchi, with students Kouris and Weeks, has shown that the growth at long distance of the graviton two-point function in an inflationary spacetime is not reflected in physical two-point functions. He is currently examining claims in the literature that the cosmological constant would be suppressed in such spacetimes due to the above-mentioned growth of the graviton two-point function. See gr-qc/0212031 and references therein. In related work, Fewster and his student Hunt have studied the quantisation of linearised gravity in general cosmological vacuum spacetimes - see arXiv:1203.0261.
In Minkowski space there is an obvious natural vacuum state for quantum field theory picked out by Poincare invariance. General spacetimes do not have any symmetries and therefore no single natural vacuum state. Instead, a class of physical states is indentified (the Hadamard class). The first fully precise definition of the Hadamard condition was given by Kay and Wald in 1991; not long after that, Radzikowski showed that this condition could be reformulated in terms of microlocal analysis. Work by the York group has extended and refined this formulation; in particular, it plays an important role in Fewster's work on quantum inequalities and was used by Kay in work (with Radzikowski and Wald) on time machine spacetimes (see below).
Quantum field theory in Minkowski space depends in many ways on the high degree of spacetime symmetry. General curved spacetimes lack any symmetry at all, which makes it hard to prove general statements about general quantum field theories (as opposed to specific models). A major development was the introduction by Brunetti, Fredenhagen and Verch of a locally covariant formulation of QFT in CST based on techniques of category theory. Fewster, and his students Sanders and Ferguson, have worked on various aspects of this formalism, including the formulation of the Dirac theory and a proof of a Reeh-Schlieder theorem (Sanders) and the analysis of when a theory can be thought to describe the same physics in all spacetimes (Fewster [with Verch], Ferguson).
General relativity may be regarded as a constrained dynamical system. Although there is a standard method for quantizing constrained systems, due to Dirac, there are obstacles to applying this method to general relativity. There has been a claim that these obstacles can be overcome, and Higuchi is currently trying to determine whether or not this claim is justified.
Higuchi has studied a model in quantum field theory in which one can consider the radiation reaction to a charged particle and then take the classical limit. He found that the result agrees with the standard Lorentz-Dirac theory (quant-ph/0208017). He is currently attempting to compare the radiation reaction in the Lorentz-Dirac theory and that in the quantum theory of a more realistic model.
Kay is presently continuing to work, partly together with Varqa Abyaneh, on a theory (see hep-th/9810077) according to which it is the entanglement between the quantum gravitational field and the quantum state of macroscopic quantum systems which is ultimately responsible for those systems being (with some probability distribution) in one or other of a number of definite spatial configurations. In particular, in the case of Schrodinger's cat this theory offers an explanation as to why the cat has to be either dead or alive.
In the past, other issues investigated by the York group have included:
In the early 1990s, Kay was involved in proving mathematical theorems which improved our understanding of why it is that - as discovered by Stephen Hawking in 1974 - black holes have to be hot.
Work by the York group has contributed to the present understanding that time machines cannot be manufactured. In particular, Kay has been involved in proving rigorous mathematical theorems (see, e.g., gr-qc/9603012 and gr-qc/9708028) which may be interpreted as telling us that it is impossible to manufacture a time machine which would allow travel to the past by warping spacetime in a way which is describable in terms of the traditional notions of spacetime geometry familiar from Einstein's classical theory of general relativity. These theorems thus tend to lend support to Stephen Hawking's Chronology Protection Conjecture although they don't exclude the possibility of time machines which are so exotic that they warp spacetime in ways which are not describable in classical terms. For a recent overview of the work by Kay mentioned above see gr-qc/0103056.
Other work by the York group has studied the properties of quantum systems on spacetimes containing time machines (setting aside the question of whether such a thing could be manufactured). Kay proposed a weakening of the usual formulation of quantum field theory for such situations; this was further investigated by Fewster and Higuchi (gr-qc/9508051) and then Fewster (gr-qc/9804012). This led to the conclusion that - at least in two dimensions - the proposed framework could not be implemented on generic time machine spacetimes. Other work conducted by Fewster, Higuchi and Wells (gr-qc/9603045) also supports the view that quantum theory (at least as presently understood) cannot generally be formulated in the presence of time machines.
Higuchi showed that the absorption cross section by a black hole (of arbitrary spacetime dimension) of any kind of massless scalar particle is exactly equal to the horizon area (hep-th/0108144). He also investigated how a charge just outside a black hole responds to Hawking radiation (see gr-qc/0011070 and references therein).
Ed Corrigan, Gustav Delius, Niall MacKay, Evgeny Sklyanin, Vidas Regelskis
Integrable models are systems in quantum physics which can be solved exactly, because they have a large number of conserved quantities and thus a high degree of symmetry. They appear in many guises - field theories, spin chains, models of statistical mechanics, models of a fixed number of interacting particles - and can also be subsumed into models with even more symmetry, such as conformal field theories and 'superintegrable' models (such as Newtonian gravity and the hydrogen atom!).
The last few decades have seen a resurgence of exactly-solvable physical systems, which appear ubiquitously in modern fundamental physics. For example, they have been at the heart of recent advances in our understanding of the relationship between gauge field theory and string theory, and one of us (Niall MacKay) was an organizer of the research programme on 'Strong Fields, Integrability and Strings' at the Newton Institute, Cambridge in 2007. The mathematical beauty of such models is often seen in new algebraic structures (usually 'quantum groups'), and we have been involved in the discovery and development of many of these.
In our research we typically use classical and first-order quantum ('semiclassical') methods, and try to mesh these together with algebraic techniques which can give exact (to all orders in Planck's constant) results. This gives us a window into many non-perturbative phenomena, such as
To study these we use extended symmetries and principles like
Besides their utility in unravelling the non-perturbative structure of two-dimensional quantum field theories these symmetry principles fascinate us because of their intrinsic mathematical beauty. Particular examples of fruitful models are
Quantum Foundations research aims at understanding the puzzling features of quantum theory such as: indeterminacy; the incompatibility of pairs of physical quantities (aka complementarity); the fact that measurements necessarily affect the observed system (aka Heisenberg effect); the strange way in which quantum systems are correlated (aka entanglement); and quantum nonlocality. As well as marking the contrast between quantum and classical physical theories, these features have been found to constitute potentially powerful resources for information processing, thus giving rise to the novel and rapidly developing field of Quantum Information Science, where new paradigms of computation, communication and cryptography are being explored.
Research in the quantum information and foundations group focuses on structural aspects of quantum theory that are relevant to quantum information. Current research themes include:
Our group maintains interactions with researchers in the Physics and Computer Science Departments through the Quantum Information Seminar held weekly in term time. Regional cooperations are facilitated through the White Rose Universities Consortium which sponsors regular quantum information meetings in Leeds, Sheffield and York. International collaborations include the Operational Quantum Physics group at the University of Turku.
Continuous ('Lie') groups, such as the unitary and orthogonal groups, have been at the heart of the development and classification of new models of particle physics. But at the end of the 1970s hints appeared that, at least in some simple models, there were more subtle algebraic structures, based on Lie groups but deformed in some way dependent on Planck's constant: hence 'quantum' groups. These were set on firm mathematical foundations in the 1980s by Jimbo and by Drinfeld, who later won the Fields medal for this and other work.
Quantum groups appear in many ways in mathematical physics, and especially in integrable models, both of field theory and of statistical mechanics, where they describe various sets of conserved quantities (in an extension of the ideas of spin and isospin), and also appear as purely ('auxiliary') algebraic structures.
Research at York covers this full spectrum, from the construction of quantum groups in terms of fields and physical observables through to a mathematical examination of their structure and representations.
The seminars take place on Tuesday lunchtimes at 1.20 pm (mostly internal speakers) and Thursday afternoons from 4:20 pm (mostly external speakers, and preceded by coffee/tea from 4pm), in the relaxed atmosphere of Room G/109 in James College Nucleus. The typical length of the talks is about 1 hour.
Information on How to Reach the University is available. You can locate James College on the campus map. Please contact Eli Hawkins by e-mail if you need further information.
Please also check the Upcoming Events page for other seminars which might be of interest. For example the Departmental Colloquium talks on Wednesdays sometimes are on mathematical physics.
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Date and time |
Title | Speaker | Room |
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| April 23, 2013, 13:15 - 14:15 | Cosmological aspects of quantum fields in de Sitter space | Yusuke Korai (Kyoto) | G/109 |
| April 30, 2013, 13:15 - 14:15 | The Objective Indefiniteness Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics: Partition Logic, Logical Information Theory and Quantum Mechanics | David Ellerman (UC Riverside) | G/109 |
| May 7, 2013, 13:15 - 14:15 | Galois automorphisms of a symmetric measurement | Marcus Appleby (Queen Mary) | G/109 |
| May 9, 2013, 16:15 - 17:30 | What can we learn about quantum gravity from locally covariant quantum field theory? | Katharina Rejzner (Rome) | G/109 |
| May 15, 2013, 11:00 - 16:30 | North British Mathematical Physics Seminar 38 | Bostelmann, Winyard, Mylonas, Cadamuro, Vicedo | K/133 (King's Manor) |
| May 30, 2013, 16:15 - 17:30 | Control of Quantum Systems | Sophie Schirmer (Swansea) | G/109 |
| June 18, 2013, 13:15 - 14:15 | Negative Energy Seen by Accelerating Observers in Flat Spacetime | Tom Roman | G/109 |
| June 27, 2013, 14:15 - 15:15 | TBA (Aron Wall) | Aron Wall (UCSB) | G/109 |
Please note that this is an evolving programme. It is advisable to (re-load and) re-check the page shortly before each talk. There is a mailing list for the seminar announcements. For further details please contact Eli Hawkins.
Archive of past Mathematical Physics Seminars: 1999-2007, 2007-today.
See the navigation menu on the left-hand side.
The seminar takes place on Mondays and Thursdays: from 4:20 pm onwards in the very relaxed atmosphere of Room G/109 in Goodricke College. The seminars are preceded by tea from 4 pm. The typical length of the talks is about 1 hour.
All lectures will take place in B/B006 (Biology). The provisional program is below. For more details, see http://winstanley.staff.shef.ac.uk/LEQG.html
All are welcome to attend, but if you plan to attend, please send an e-mail to leqg.york@googlemail.com
Programme:
Low-Energy Quantum Gravity,
University of York, 19th-20th July 2007, Biology Lecture Theatre B/B006
Thursday 19th July
2.00 - 3.15 pm David Toms (Newcastle)
Quantum gravity and gauge coupling constants
3.15 - 3.45 pm Tea and coffee
3.45 - 4.25 pm Calvin Smith (Dublin)
Bounds on negative energy in quantum field theory
4.25 - 4.55 pm Jorma Louko (Nottingham)
How often does an accelerated particle detector click?
4.55 - 5.35 pm Jean Alexandre (KCL)
A non-perturbative time-dependent string configuration without extra dimensions?
Friday 20th July
9.30 - 10.45 am Karl-Henning Rehren (Gottingen)
AdS-CFT correspondence and CFT with boundaries
10.45 - 11.15 am Tea and coffee
11.15 am - 12.30 pm Remo Garattini (Bergamo)
A multi gravity approach to space-time foam
12.30 - 2.00 pm Lunch
2.00 - 2.40 pm Veronika Hubeny (Durham)
Emergence of space-time in AdS/CFT
2.40 - 3.20 pm Atsushi Higuchi (York)
Infra-red properties of quantum field theories in de Sitter space-time
3.20 pm Tea and coffee
The seminar takes place on Mondays and Thursdays: from 4:20 pm onwards in the very relaxed atmosphere of Room G/109 in Goodricke College. The seminars are preceded by tea from 4 pm. The typical length of the talks is about 1 hour.
Please note that this is the tentative evolving program. It is advisable to (re-load and) re-check the page shortly before each talk. There is a mailing list for the seminar announcements. For further details please contact Boris Noyvert.
The seminar takes place on Mondays and Thursdays: from 4:20 pm onwards in the very relaxed atmosphere of Room G/109 in Goodricke College. The seminars are preceded by tea from 4 pm. The typical length of the talks is about 1 hour.
The seminar takes place on Mondays and Thursdays: from 4:20 pm onwards in the very relaxed atmosphere of Room G/109 in Goodricke College. The seminars are preceded by tea from 4 pm. The typical length of the talks is about 1 hour.
Information on How to Reach the University is available. Goodricke College is building 24 on the campus map. Please contact Charles Young by e-mail if you need further information.
Please also check the Departmental Events Calendar for other seminars which might be of interest. For example the Departmental Colloquium talks on Wednesdays sometimes are on mathematical physics.
Mon 13 March at 16:20:
Valya Khoze (Durham)
New results in the beta-deformed conformal N=4 SYM: Perturbative Amplitudes, AdS/CFT Correspondence...
The seminar takes place on Mondays and Thursdays: from 4:20 pm onwards in the very relaxed atmosphere of Room G/109 in Goodricke College. The seminars are preceded by tea from 4 pm. The typical length of the talks is about 1 hour. Information on How to Reach the University is available. Goodricke College is building 24 on the campus map. Please contact Charles Young by e-mail if you need further information. Please also check the Departmental Events Calendar for other seminars which might be of interest. For example the Departmental Colloquium talks on Wednesdays sometimes are on mathematical physics. ProgrammePlease note that this is the tentative evolving program. It is advisable to (re-load and) re-check the page shortly before each talk. There is a mailing list for the seminar announcements. For further details please contact Charles Young | ||
| 20th October 2005 Thursday 4.20pm | David Kagan (DAMTP, Cambridge) Supersymmetric Quantum Mechanics: Central Extensions and Extra Dimensions | |
| 24th October 2005 Monday 4.20pm | Masashi Hamanaka (Nagoya University) Towards Noncommutative Integrable Systems and Soliton Theories | |
| 27th October 2005 Thursday 4.20pm | Thomas Quella (Kings College, London) Supergroup sigma-models and strings in RR backgrounds | |
| 31st October 2005 Monday 4.20pm | Mathematical Physics Group Meeting | |
| 3rd November 2005 Thursday 4.20pm | Calvin Smith (York) TBA | |
| 7th November 2005 Monday 4.20pm | Bernard Kay (York) Quantum Field Theory in Curved Spacetime | |
| 10th November 2005 Thursday 4.20pm | Terry Rudolph (Imperial) |How good must single photon sources be for optical quantum computation?› + |Loss tolerant cluster state computation› | |
| 14th November 2005 Monday 4.20pm | ||
| 17th November 2005 Thursday 4.20pm | David Olive (Swansea) Minimal representations and Freudenthal Triple Systems | |
| 21st November 2005 Monday 4.20pm | ||
24th November 2005 Thursday 4.20pm | Valentina Riva (Oxford) New perspective on critical phenomena: SLE and its connection with CFT. | |
| 28th November 2005 Monday 4.20pm | Ruth Williams (DAMTP, Cambridge) Discrete Quantum Gravity | |
| 1st December 2005 Thursday 4.20pm | Gaetano Bertoldi (Swansea) Large N double-scaling limits of 4d gauge theories | |
| 5th December 2005 Monday 4.20pm | ||
| 8th December 2005 Thursday 4.20pm | Jonathan Halliwell (Imperial) Emergent Classicality via Commuting Position and Momentum Operators | |
| 12th December 2005 Monday 4.20pm | ||
| 15th December 2005 Thursday 4.20pm | Lutz Osterbrink (York) Energy inequalities for the non-minimally coupled scalar field | |
| 19th December 2005 Monday 4.20pm | Yann Golanski (York) Dark energy: Who would have thought Einstein was right? | |
See also our Archive of Past Mathematical Physics Seminars
Information on How to Reach the University is available. Goodricke College is building 24 on the campus map. Please contact Bernard Kay by e-mail if you need further information.
| 28th April 2005 Thursday 4.20pm V/123 | Christian Micheletti (SISSA, Trieste) Elastic properties of proteins: characterization of the flexibility of proteins and of their functional movements Note unusual venue: VANBRUGH V/123 |
| 9th May 2005 Monday 4.20pm | I.V. Komarov (St. Petersburg) Poisson maps and Lax pairs for the so(4) Kowalevski top |
| 16th May 2005 Monday 4.20pm | Anne C. Davis (DAMTP, Cambridge) Exploring Extra Dimensions Through Cosmology |
| 23rd May 2005 Monday 4.20pm | Tobias Osborne (Bristol) General Monogamy Inequality for Bipartite Qubit Entanglement |
| 30th May 2005 Monday 4.20pm | Atsushi Higuchi (York) Asymptotic Freedom (Instructional Lecture) |
| 6th June 2005 Monday 4.20pm | Da-jun Zhang (Shanghai) Solutions in Wronskian form to soliton equations |
| 13th June 2005 Monday 4.20pm | Paul Sutcliffe (Kent) Schrodinger-Chern-Simons vortex dynamics |
| 28th June 2005 Tuesday (11.45am to 6pm) | Note: Five Mathematical Physics Seminars in the North British Mathematical Physics Seminar today |
| 30th August 2005 Tuesday 4.20pm | Dmitri Lebedev (ITEP, Moscow) On a class of Representations of Quantum groups and Moduli space of Monopoles I |
| 2nd September 2005 Friday 11.30am | Dmitri Lebedev (ITEP, Moscow) On a class of Representations of Quantum groups and Moduli space of Monopoles II |
Information on How to Reach the University is available. Goodricke College is building 24 on the campus map. Please contact Bernard Kay by e-mail if you need further information.
Please also check the Departmental Events Calendar for other seminars which might be of interest. For example the Departmental Colloquium talks on Wednesdays sometimes are on mathematical physics.
| 17th January 2005 Monday 4.20pm | Vincent Caudrelier (LAPTH, Annecy) Impurity in integrable systems: tools, examples and physical consequences |
| 20th January 2005 Thursday 4.20pm | Andrei Mudrov (MPI, Bonn) Explicit equivariant quantization of semisimple conjugacy classes of simple matrix groups |
| 27th January 2005 Thursday 4.20pm | Nicola Pinamonti (Trento, Italy) Conformal symmetry breaking on Killing horizons |
| 31st January 2005 Monday 4.20pm | Jorma Louko (Nottingham) Spin and charges: Weapons of mass construction |
| 10th February 2005 Thursday 4.20pm | Zoltan Nagy (Cergy-Pontoise) Construction of commuting traces and spin chains using dynamical quadratic algebras |
| 17th February 2005 Thursday 4.20pm | Matthias Christandl (CQG, Cambridge) Uncertainty, monogamy, and implications for entanglement |
| 21st February 2005 Monday 4.20pm | Ian Hinder (Southampton) Stability in numerical relativity |
| 24th February 2005 Thursday 4.20pm | Nilanjana Datta (CQG, Cambridge) Perfect state transfer in quantum spin networks |
| 28th February 2005 Monday 4.20pm | Jie Xiao (Tsinghua University, Beijing) Quiver representations, Ringel-Hall algebras and quantum groups |
| 7th March 2005 Monday 4.20pm | Graeme Mitchison (CQG, Cambridge) The spectra of quantum states and their marginals: a group representation perspective |
| 10th March 2005 Thursday 4.20pm | Veronique Hussin (CRM, Montreal) Degeneracies of the energy spectrum of the Jaynes-Cummings model and coherent states |
| 14th March 2005 Monday 4.20pm | Valentina Riva (Oxford) Semiclassical methods in 2D QFT: spectra and finite-size effects |
Stability in Numerical Relativity
by Ian Hinder (Southampton)
When solving the Einstein equations numerically, much emphasis is placed on the stability of the numerical scheme. For formulations of the time evolution equations which are second order in space, special care has to be taken in the definition of stability. I review our recent work in this area, as well as notions of well-posedness for the associated second order in space PDE systems.
The spectra of quantum states and their marginals: a group representation perspective.
by Graeme Mitchison (CQG, Cambridge)
I shall describe joint work with Matthias Christandl in which we investigated the "quantum marginal problem". Imagine that one is given a bipartite quantum state (a density matrix rho_AB). By tracing out each party, one obtains two marginal states (density matrices rho_A and rho_B). The spectra of the original state and its two marginals consitute a special triple, and we found a way to characterize such triples in terms of representations of the symmetric group.
Construction of commuting traces and spin chains using dynamical quadratic algebras.
by Zoltan Nagy (Cergy-Pointoise)
I will talk about dynamical extensions of quadratic quantum exchange algebras introduced by Freidel and Maillet and discuss their fusion and comodule structures. I will then show how these structures allow for building of commuting traces and spin chain type hamiltonians.
Information on How to Reach the University is available. Goodricke College is building 24 on the campus map. Please contact Bernard Kay by e-mail if you need further information.
Please also check the Departmental Events Calendar for other seminars which might be of interest. For example the Departmental Colloquium talks on Wednesdays sometimes are on mathematical physics.
| 18th October Monday 4.20pm | Mathematical Physics Group Meeting |
| 25th October Monday 4.20pm | Martin Speight (Leeds) Algebraic topology of the Skyrme configuration space |
| 28th October Thursday 4.20pm | Minitalks by Atsushi Higuchi, Barry Miller and Charles Young (York) |
| 1st November Monday 4.20pm | Minitalks by Calvin Smith, Giles Martin, and Varqa Abyaneh (York) |
| 11th November Thursday 4.20pm | Simon Ross (Durham) Time-dependent spacetimes in AdS/CFT |
| 15th November Monday 4.20pm | Nick Evans (Southampton) A gravitational dual description of chiral symmetry breaking |
| 22nd November Monday 4.20pm | Roberto Casadio (Bologna) Improved WKB analysis of cosmological perturbations |
| 25 November Thursday 4.20pm | Richard Szabo (Heriot Watt) 2D Yang-Mills theory and moduli spaces of holomorphic differentials |
| 2nd December Thursday 4.20pm | Nicolas Crampe' (York) Closed and open spin chain in any representation |
| 6th December Monday 4.20pm | Ron King (Southampton) Local equivalence of two-qubit states: a problem in invariant theory |
| 13th December Monday 4.20pm | Robert Weston (Heriot Watt) Transmitting defects in solvable lattice models |
Improved WKB analysis of cosmological perturbations
by Roberto Casadio (Bologna)
I present improved WKB-type approximations in order to study cosmological perturbations beyond the lowest order. The methods are based on functions which approximate the true perturbation modes over the complete range of the independent variable, including the turning point, and employ both a perturbative Green's function technique and an adiabatic expansion in order to compute higher order corrections. The methods are tested on the benchmark of power-law inflation: the next-to-leading order adiabatic expansion yields the amplitude of the power spectra with excellent accuracy, whereas the next-to-leading order with the perturbative Green's function method does not improve the leading order result significantly. In more general cases, either or both methods may be useful.
Local equivalence of two-qubit states: a problem in invariant theory
by Ron King (Southampton)
Two-qubit states can be described in terms of a density matrix. To classify states up to local equivalence it is necessary to study invariants that are polynomial in the density matrix parameters. Here we tackle the problem of not just counting the number of linearly independent polynomial invariants of given degree, but also identifying a suitable basis that can be used to generate them all quite explicitly. This is a classical invariant theory problem involving the group U(16) and its restriction to a particular subgroup U(2)xU(2). A complete solution is provided, including en route a few surprises and some interesting syzygies.
Information on How to Reach the University is available. Goodricke College is building 24 on the campus map. Please contact Bernard Kay by e-mail if you need further information.
Please also check the Departmental Events Calendar for other seminars which might be of interest. For example the Departmental Colloquium talks on Wednesdays sometimes are on mathematical physics.
| 19 April Monday 4.20pm | Yvette Fuentes-Guridi (Oxford) Holonomic quantum computation in the presence of decoherence |
| 26th April Monday 4.20pm | Ed Copeland (Sussex) Trying to understand the nature of dark energy in the Universe |
| 13th May Thursday afternoon | No Seminar But ... There are some interesting MMath presentations |
| 17th May Monday 4.20pm | Alan George (York) Coupling the massive Klein-Gordon field to a boundary oscillator |
| 20th May Thursday 4.20pm | Andreas Winter (Bristol) Generic aspects of quantum entanglement |
| 24th May Monday 4.20pm | Alan George (York) Coupling the massive Klein-Gordon field to a boundary oscillator (continued) |
| 27th May Thursday 4.20pm | Gabor Toth (Eotvos University, Budapest) On N=1 supersymmetric boundary bootstrap |
| 17th June Thursday 4.20pm | Stefan Antusch (Southampton) Neutrino Mass Models |
| 28 June Monday 4.20pm | Zoltan Bajnok (Eotvos University, Budapest) Semiclassical Sine-Gordon on the strip |
Holonomic quantum computation in the presence of decoherence
by Yvette Fuentes-Guridi (Oxford)
We investigate the effects of decoherence in the geometric evolution of states of a degenerate quantum system. This is done by generalizing the scheme for geometric phases in open systems to non-Abelian holonomies. The formalism is applied to estimate the errors produced by performing an universal set of holonomic quantum gates in the presence of an environment. We pinpoint the source of error in the scheme that must be corrected to achieve holonomic quantum computation completely robust to decoherence.
Generic aspects of quantum entanglement
by Andreas Winter (Bristol)
Probability theory has some insight to offer into the typical behaviour of states on large composite quantum systems. For example, because they are of measure zero in state space, product states are "never" seen when drawing a pure state uniformly at random. It may already come as a surprise that for large local dimension in a bipartite system the overwhelming majority of all pure states is in fact close to maximally entangled.
But even more is true: random subspaces of close to full dimension will with overwhelming probability contain only almost maximally entangled states. This implies that under a certain natural probability measure the generic mixed state will have almost maximal entanglement of formation. On the other hand, the distillability properties of these states can be shown to be very poor, both for EPR pairs and for secret key.
The techniques carry over to multiparty states, and offer a vision of "generic entanglement" as highly irreversible but potentially quite uniform - in contrast to the bewildering array of different types of entanglement in an exact classification. This is joint work with Patrick Hayden and Debbie Leung (Caltech).
Information on How to Reach the University is available. Goodricke College is building 24 on the campus map. Please contact Bernard Kay by e-mail if you need further information.
Please also check the Departmental Events Calendar for other seminars which might be of interest. For example the Departmental Colloquium talks on Wednesdays sometimes are on mathematical physics.
| 15th January Thursday 4.20pm | Alexander Mikhailov (Leeds) Infinite dimensional automorphic Lie algebras |
| 19th January Monday 4.20pm | David McMullan (Plymouth) Charges in gauge theories |
| 22nd January Thursday 4.20pm | Bernard Kay (York) Quantum Field Theory in Curved Spacetime 1 |
| 26th January Monday 4.20pm | Bernard Kay (York) Quantum Field Theory in Curved Spacetime 2 |
| 29th January Thursday 4.20pm | Bernard Kay (York) Quantum Field Theory in Curved Spacetime 3 |
| 2nd February Monday 4.20pm | Anne Taormina (Durham) Symmetries of string theory |
| 5th February Thursday 4.20pm | Atsushi Higuchi (York) Quantum Field Theory in Curved Spacetime 4 |
| 9th February Monday 4.20pm | David Pearson (Hull) Spectral analysis of Schrodinger operators in Quantum Theory |
| 12th February Thursday 4.20pm | Atsushi Higuchi (York) Quantum Field Theory in Curved Spacetime 5 |
| 16th February Monday 4.20pm | Tim Hollowood (Swansea) Integrability and gauge theories |
| 19th February Thursday 4.20pm | Atsushi Higuchi (York) Quantum Field Theory in Curved Spacetime 6 |
| 26th February Thursday 4.20pm | Gary Gibbons (DAMTP, Cambridge) Consistent dimensional reductions from higher dimensional gravity and super gravity theories |
| 1st March Monday 4.20pm | Koenraad Audenaert (Bangor) There, and back again: Quantum theory and global optimisation |
| 4th March Thursday 4.20pm | Chris Fewster (York) Quantum Field Theory in Curved Spacetime 7 |
| 8th March Monday 4.20pm | no seminar |
| 11th March Thursday 4.15pm G/010 | Adrian Ottewill (University College, Dublin) Quantum fields near rotating black holes Note different venue and slightly earlier start |
| 15th March Monday 4.20pm | Chris Fewster (York) Quantum Field Theory in Curved Spacetime 8 |
| 18th March Thursday 4.20pm | Chris Fewster (York) Quantum Field Theory in Curved Spacetime 9 |
There, and Back Again: Quantum Theory and Global Optimisation
by Koenraad Audenaert (Bangor)
We consider a problem in quantum theory that can be formulated as an optimisation problem and present a global optimisation algorithm for solving it, the foundation of which relies in turn on a theorem from quantum theory. To wit, we consider the maximal output purity $\nu_q$ of a quantum channel as measured by Schatten $q$-norms, for integer $q$. This quantity is of fundamental importance in the study of quantum channel capacities in quantum information theory. To calculate $\nu_q$ one has to solve a non-convex optimisation problem that typically exhibits local optima. We show that this particular problem can be approximated to arbitrary precision by an eigenvalue problem over a larger matrix space, thereby circumventing the problem of local optima. The mathematical proof behind this algorithm relies on the Quantum de Finetti theorem, which is a theorem used in the study of the foundations of quantum theory.
We expect that the approach presented here can be generalised and will turn out to be applicable to a larger class of global optimisation problems. We also present some preliminary numerical results, showing that, at least for small problem sizes, the present approach is practically realisable.
Information on How to Reach the University is available. Goodricke College is building 24 on the campus map. Please contact Bernard Kay by e-mail if you need further information.
Please also check the Departmental Events Calendar for other seminars which might be of interest. For example the Departmental Colloquium talks on Wednesdays sometimes are on mathematical physics.
| 22nd September Monday 2.15pm | Jason Szulc (York) Inequalities for marginal probabilities, quantum and classical |
| 13th October Monday 4.20pm | Mathematical Physics Group Meeting |
| 16th October Thursday 4.20pm | Akihiro Ishibashi (DAMTP, Cambridge) On stability of higher dimensional static black holes |
| 20th October Monday 4.20pm | Dan Tovey (Sheffield) Searching for Supersymmetric Dark Matter at Boulby Mine |
| 23-25 October | ABC-KLM Meeting |
| 23rd October Thursday 4.30pm | Erika Andersson (Strathclyde) Generalised measurements in quantum mechanics Note unusual time and place: The venue for this talk is now Derwent College room D/056 (10 minutes' walk from Mathematics Department) because the talk will take place within the ABC-KLM Meeting (see link above) |
| 27th October Monday 4.20pm | Sean Hartnoll (DAMTP, Cambridge) Black hole instabilities, thermodynamics and duality |
| 30th October Thursday 4.20pm | Davide Fioravanti (York) An idea of universality in theories with a mass scale |
| 3rd November Monday 4.20pm | Werner Nahm (IAS, Dublin) Conformal Field Theory and an extended Bloch group |
| 10th November Monday 4.20pm | Tomihiro Harada (QMW, London) Self-similar solutions, critical behaviour and convergence to attractor in gravitational collapse |
| 13th November Thursday 4.20pm | Jiannis Pachos (Imperial College, London) Coherent evolutions in one and two dimensional optical lattices. |
| 17th November Monday 4.20pm | Niall MacKay (York) The Mathematics and Physics of Yangians 1 |
| 20th November Thursday 4.20pm | Michael Melgaard (Uppsala) Spectral Theory of Schr"{o}dinger and Dirac Operators with External Magnetic Fields. Part II: Aharonov-Bohm magnetic fields and Lieb-Thirring inequalities. Note This is the second of two talks. The first (which is subtitled Part I: Eigenvalue Asymptotics ) will be at 11.15 am on Wednesday 19th November in G/109 in the GANT seminar series. But it will not be necessary to have gone to that talk to understand this one. |
| 24th November Monday 4.20pm | Niall MacKay (York) The Mathematics and Physics of Yangians 2 |
| 27th November Thursday 4.20pm | Viv Kendon (Imperial College, London) Quantum versions of random walks for quantum computing |
| 1st December Monday 4.20pm | Charles Young (DAMTP, Cambridge) Local conserved charges in supersymmetric sigma models |
| 4th December Thursday 4.20pm | Niall MacKay (York) The Mathematics and Physics of Yangians 3 |
| 8th December Monday 4.20pm | Niall MacKay (York) The Mathematics and Physics of Yangians 4 |
| 11th December Thursday 4.20pm | Niall MacKay (York) The Mathematics and Physics of Yangians 5 |
The objective of this network is to bring together groups in the UK having a common goal in pursuing the deep connections between mathematics and physics, primarily algebraic geometry, operator algebras and quantum groups in pure mathematics and conformal field theory, string theory and statistical mechanics in mathematical and theoretical physics. For more information and details of past meetings see the network's webpage.
The meeting is open to all. Please register with the local organiser to receive further information. There is no conference fee. Some funds are available to fund participants belonging to one of the network nodes.
We have booked Derwent Terrace Room from the morning of Thursday 23rd of October until the afternoon of Saturday 25th of October. This room will serve as our base room which we will use for tea, coffee and discussions while the talks will take place in nearby lecture rooms.
Thursday 23rd October
| morning | Gathering in Derwent Terrace Room |
|---|---|
| 1:00 pm | Lunch |
| 2:00 pm | Evgueni Sklyanin Separation of variables and related topics in room D/056 |
| 3:15 pm | Zoltán Bajnok Boundary quantum field theories in room D/056 |
| 4:30 pm | Erika Andersson: Generalised measurements in quantum mechanics in room D/056 |
| 6:45 pm | Dinner in the Roger Kirk centre |
Friday 24th October
| 8:30 am | Breakfast in Wentworth College |
|---|---|
| 9:30 am | Peter West tba in room L/037 |
| 11:30 am | Alessio Corti and Vasily Golyshev in room D/056 |
| 1:00 pm | Lunch |
| 2:15 pm | Alice Rogers: Morse Theory on Phase Space in room C/A/101 |
| 3:30 pm | Reidun Twarok: Mathematical virology in room D/016 |
| 4:30 pm | Tea and Coffe in Derwent Coffee room |
| 5:00 pm | Aidan Schofield: Noncommutative moduli of vector bundles in room D/016 |
| 6:45 pm | Dinner in the "Go Down Restaurant" |
Saturday 25th October
| 8:30 am | Breakfast in Wentworth College |
|---|---|
| 9:30 am | Jakob Stix: Introduction to logarithmic Geometry in room C/A/101 |
| 11:00 am | Shahn Majid: Fock space representation for Anyons in room D/056 |
| 12:15 pm | Lunch in Vanbrugh College |
There will be breaks with refreshments between all talks.
How to Reach the University of York.
The meeting will take place mostly in Derwent College. This is building 23 on the campus map
When you arrive at York railway station you can either take bus no 4 to Heslington Hall (building 1 adjacent to Derwent College) or take a taxi and ask the driver to drop you at Derwent College. Alternatively, in case you have a lot of luggage and will be staying in Wenworth College, see below, you could take the taxi to Wentworth College and then walk to Derwent College from there (5 or 10 minutes walk across campus).
For more information see "How to Reach the University of York".
The following participants will be staying in Wentworth College (arrival and departure dates in parentheses):
Generalised measurements in quantum mechanics
by Erika Andersson (Strathclyde)
In standard textbooks on quantum mechanics, a quantum measurement is usually described as a projection in the eigenbasis of the measured observable. This definition of projective (von Neumann) measurements is, however, too narrow. It does not allow us to describe all possible experimental measurement procedures. For example, we cannot accommodate joint measurements of non-commuting observables. Also, in a real experiment, with detector inefficiencies and other imperfections, what results is generally not a projective measurement on the original measured quantum system.
Generalised quantum measurements can describe any measurement that can be realised on a quantum system (provided that quantum mechanics holds). They are often called POM or POVM measurements, and are essentialy obtained by removing the requirement that the measurement operators have to be projectors. This talk will introduce generalised measurements and explain why they are useful. Generalised measurements have important applications for example in quantum communication theory, where one wants to know exactly what the optimal measurement strategy for a certain kind of signal is. They can also describe joint measurements of non- commuting observables, as well as real experimental situations with imperfect detectors.
Self-similar solutions, critical behaviour and convergence to attractor in gravitational collapse
by Tomihiro Harada (QMW)
General relativity as well as Newtonian gravity admits self-similar solutions due to the scale-invariance. This talk reviews self-similar solutions and their relevance to gravitational collapse. In particular, our attention is mainly paid on the crucial role of self-similar solutions in the critical behavior and attraction in gravitational collapse. Implications to cosmic censorship are also discussed.
Quantum versions of random walks for quantum computing
by Viv Kendon (Imperial)
Will we be using a quantum computer for numerical simulations in the next decade? Quantum computing offers the potential for exponentially more efficient calculations than classical computers. But not for all problems, we know of a set that make use of a quantum version of Fourier Transforms for their speed up (including factoring large numbers) and one example using a quantum version of a random walk. Other classes of problems, such as searching an unsorted database, can have at most a quadratic speed up. And then there are all the difficulties of actually building a quantum computer... I will give an introductory overview of quantum computing, suitable for the non-specialist, in the course of which my own work on quantum versions of random walks will get a brief mention.
Conformal Field Theory and an extended Bloch group
by Werner Nahm (IAS, Dublin)
Integrable perturbations of conformal quantum field theories in two dimensions and invariants of hyperbolic manifolds are both described by an extension of the Bloch group, an object in algebraic K-theory. For the quantum field theories, the Bethe ansatz yields finite order elements in this group, which statisfy certain algebraic equations. Examples are provided by pairs of ADET diagrams, and in the case of two A-type diagrams all solutions of these equations are obtained.
Coherent evolutions in one and two dimensional optical lattices
by Jiannis Pachos (Imperial)
We consider the controlled manipulation of one dimensional bosonic or fermionic optical lattices, induced by tunnelling or collisions of the atoms within the lattice. As an application, we discuss the implementation of quantum computation where each atom provides one qubit. The resulting quantum register is robust against dephasing due to longitudinal lattice decoherence. Further studies concern one or two dimensional optical lattices and result in solid state models with new intriguing three body interactions.
Information on How to Reach the University is available. Goodricke College is building 24 on the campus map. Please contact Clare Dunning by e-mail if you need further information.
Please also check the Departmental Events Calendar for other seminars which might be of interest. For example the Departmental Colloquium talks on W ednesdays sometimes are on mathematical physics.
| 28 April Monday 4.20pm | José Miguel Figueroa y O'Farrill (Edinburgh) Plane wave limits in string and gauge theory |
| 6 May Tuesday 11:30 am Unusual Time | Mark Gould (Brisbane) Classification of unitary representations of simple Lie superalgebras |
| 22nd May Thursday 4.20pm | Evgueni Sklyanin (York) Q-operator and separation of variables for Jack polynomials |
| 29th May Thursday 4.20pm | Betti Hartmann (Durham) Monopoles and "hairy" black holes |
| 2nd June Monday 4.20pm | Valeria Del Prete (KCL) A theoretical model for population coding of mixed continuous and discrete stimuli: from the linear rise to the asymptotic regime. |
| 5th June Thursday 4.20pm | Chris Fewster (York) Stability of quantum systems at three scales |
| 9th June Monday 4.20pm | Cristina Zambon (York) Classically integrable field theories with boundary conditions |
| 16th June Monday 4.20pm | Andy Hone (UKC) Peakons, Poisson brackets and a functional equation. |
| 19th June Thursday 4.20pm | Hugh Jones (Imperial) PT symmetry versus Hermiticity in Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Field Theory |
| 23rd June Monday 4.20pm | Jorma Louko (Nottingham) Higher dimensional Einstein black holes and AdS/CFT conjecture |
| 26th June Thursday 4.20pm | Roger Behrend (Cardiff) Reflections on the Reflection Equation |
| 7 July Monday 4.20pm | Martin Halpern (Berkeley) Twisted Open Strings from Closed Strings: The WZW Orientation Orbifolds |
| 22nd July Tuesday 4.15pm | Christopher Fuchs (Bell Labs) What is the Difference between a Quantum Observer and a Weatherman? |
| 25th July Friday 2.15pm | Ruediger Schack (Royal Holloway) Compatible quantum state assignments |
| 8th September Monday 2.15pm | Rainer Verch (Max Planck Institute, Leipzig) Generally covariant quantum field theory and spin and statistics for quantum fields on manifolds |
| 22nd September Monday 2.15pm | Jason Szulc (York) Inequalities for marginal probabilities, quantum and classical |
Information on How to Reach the University is available. Goodricke College is building 24 on the campus map. Please contact Gustav Delius by e-mail if you need further information.
Please also check the Departmental Events Calendar for other seminars which might be of interest. For example the Departmental Colloquium talks on Wednesdays sometimes are on mathematical physics.
| 16 January Thursday 4.20pm | Sam Braunstein (Bangor) Entanglement in quantum information processing |
| 20 January Monday 4.20pm | Ed Corrigan (York) Graduate Lectures on String Theory |
| 30 January Thursday 4.20pm | Ian Drummond (Cambridge) Bi-metric gravity - an alternative to dark matter |
| 6 February Thursday 4.20pm | Jonathan Halliwell (Imperial) Decoherence: Some Recent Developments |
| 27 February Thursday 4.20pm | Fay Dowker (QMW) A spontaneous collapse model on a lattice |
| 6 March Thursday 4.20pm | Francesco Ravanini (Bologna) Excited Boundary Flows in the Tricritical Ising Model |
| 13 March Thursday 4.20pm | Jon Links (Brisbane) Exactly solvable model for atomic-molecular Bose-Einstein condensates |
| 17 March Monday 4.20pm | Klaus Fredenhagen (Hamburg) Time as an observable in quantum mechanics |
| 19 March Wednesday 4.20pm | Klaus Fredenhagen (Hamburg) Quantum field theory in curved spacetime |
| 20 March Thursday 4.20pm | Klaus Fredenhagen (Hamburg) Quantum field theory on noncommutative spacetimes |
|
Mathematical Physics Seminars |
| 22 August Thursday 4.20pm | Masashi Hamanaka (Univ. of Tokyo, YITP) Non-commutative ADHM construction |
| 14 October Monday 4.20pm | Tony Sudbery (York) No-collapse interpretations of quantum mechanics |
| 17 October Thursday 4.20pm | Bernard Kay (York) Remarks on the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics |
| 21 October Monday 4.20pm | Postponed due to illness Deborah Konkowski (US Naval Academy) Are classically singular spacetimes quantum-mechanically singular as well? |
| 24 October Thursday 4.20pm | Leah Henderson (Bristol) Optimal entanglement generation from quantum operations |
| 28 October Monday 4.20pm | Ed Corrigan (York) Graduate Lectures on String Theory |
| 31 October Thursday 4.20pm | Atsushi Higuchi (York) Radiation reaction in scalar QED |
| 4 November Monday 4.20pm | Ed Corrigan (York) Graduate Lectures on String Theory |
| 7 November Thursday 4.20pm | Deborah Konkowski (US Naval Academy) Are classically singular spacetimes quantum-mechanically singular as well? |
| 11 November Monday 4.20pm | Ed Corrigan (York) Graduate Lectures on String Theory |
| 14 November Thursday 4.20pm | Marco Bellacosa (Bologna) Nonlinear Integral Equations for Quantum Integrable Models with Boundaries |
| 18 November Monday 4.20pm | Ed Corrigan (York) Graduate Lectures on String Theory |
| 21 November Thursday 4.20pm | Wojtek Zakrzewski (Durham) Some Aspects of the Modified Nonlinear Schrodinger Equation |
| 25 November Monday 4.20pm | Ed Corrigan (York) Graduate Lectures on String Theory |
| 28 November Thursday 4.20pm | Mitch Pfenning (York) Quantum Inequalities |
| 2 December Monday 4.20pm | Ed Corrigan (York) Graduate Lectures on String Theory |
| 5 December Thursday 4.20pm | Joe Hilling (York) The History Projector Operator Formalism of Consistent Histories |
| 9 December Monday 4.20pm | Ed Corrigan (York) Graduate Lectures on String Theory |
| 12 December Thursday 4.20pm | Emily King (York) Applications of consistent histories |
| 22 April Monday 4.20pm | Richard Woodard (University of Florida) A Non-Technical (Honest!) Description of the Problem of Quantum Gravity |
| 2 May Thursday 4.20pm | Patrick Dorey (Durham) Exact S-matrices for the q-state Potts models |
| 6 May Monday 4.20pm | Gustav W Delius (York) Graduate Lectures on Solitons and Boundaries: Classical Soliton Solutions |
| 9 May Thursday 4.20pm | Theodora Ioannidou (Kent) Bogomolny Yang-Mills-Higgs Solutions in (2+1) anti-de Sitter Space |
| 13 May Monday 4.20pm | Paul Sutcliffe (Kent) Solitons in the Heart |
| 16 May Thursday 4.20pm | Charis Anastopoulos (Utrecht) Quantum mechanical histories and interference phases |
| 20 May Monday 4.20pm | Bernhard Baumgartner (Vienna) Order relations for sets and inequalities for entropies |
| 21 May Tuesday 5.20pm Note special time and venue: V/123 | LMS Hardy Lecture Alexander Its The non-linear Schroedinger equation on the half-line and on the interval |
| 27 May Monday 4.20pm | Stephen Siklos (DAMTP) Singularities and invariants in general relativity |
| 30 May Thursday 4.20pm | Hendryk Pfeiffer (DAMTP) Spin foam models in quantum gravity |
| 6 June Thursday 4.20pm | S.M. Chitre (Tata Institute) The seismic sun and solar neutrinos |
| 13 June Thursday | Meeting of the North British Mathematial Physics Seminar |
| 17 June Monday 4.20pm | Thomas Roman (Connecticut) Constraints on Spatial Distributions of Negative Energy |
| 20 June Thursday 4.20pm | Tony Sudbery (York) Quantum Fallacies A guided discussion |
| 14 January Monday 4.20pm | Jose Figueroa-O-Farrill (Edinburgh) Lie Branes: recent results |
| 17 January Thursday 4.20pm | Larry Ford (Tufts) Focusing Vacuum Fluctuations |
| 21 January Monday 4.20pm | Katsushi Ito (Tokyo Institute of Technology) Scattering of noncommutative solitons |
| 24 January Thursday 4.20pm | Kevin Graham (King's College, London) Perturbations of Conformal Field Theory by Boundary Condition Changing Operators |
| 31 January Thursday 4.20pm | Atsushi Higuchi (York) Discussion on Topological K-Theory |
| 4 Feburary Monday 4.20pm | Atsushi Higuchi (York) Discussion on Topological K-Theory |
| 5 February Tuesday 4.20pm (Note unusual day) | Michael Atiyah (Edinburgh) K-theory and charges |
| 7 Feburary Thursday 4.20pm | Yann Golanski (NNDG York) Modelling of early stages of stellar formation |
| 11 February Monday 4.20pm | James Gray (Newcastle) Moving branes in Heterotic M-theory cosmology |
| 14 February Thursday 4.20pm | Ian Lawrie (Leeds) Dissipation and friction in the equations of motion for scalar fields |
| 18 February Monday 4.20pm | David Toms (Newcastle) Quantum Fields off the Brane |
| 21 February Thursday 4.20pm | Andrei Bytsko (Steklov Institute, St.Petersburg) Hamiltonians for higher spin XXZ chains |
| 11 March Monday 4.20pm | Robert Oeckl (Marseille) tba |
| 15 October Monday 4.20pm | Jason Szulc (York) The Nobel-prize-winning experiment on Bose-Einstein condensation |
| 18 October Thursday 4.20pm | Atsushi Higuchi (York) Low-frequency scalar absorption cross sections for stationary black holes |
| 22 October Monday 4.20pm | Alan George (York) Quintessence |
| 25 October Thursday 4.20pm | Ruth Gregory (Durham) Braneworld instantons |
| 29 October Monday 4.20pm | Mitch Pfenning (York) Radiation reaction in electromagnetism and general relativity: I electromagnetism |
| 1 November Thursday 4.20pm | Mitch Pfenning (York) Radiation reaction in electromagnetism and general relativity: II gravitation |
| 5 November Monday 4.20pm | Chris Fewster (York) Microlocal Analysis This seminar forms part of the York Mathematics Department Series of expository seminars for staff and students |
| 8 November Thursday 4.20pm | Ian Jack (Liverpool) Finite non-commutative theories |
| 12 November Monday 4.20pm | Tony Sudbery and Jason Szulc (York) Report on the Turin Meeting on Quantum Information (Note that the planned talks by Jochen Weller, previously announced in this slot, have had to be cancelled.) |
| 15 November Thursday 4.20pm | (no seminar) |
| 19 November Monday 4.20pm | Ian McIntosh (York) A rough and ready guide to cohomology. Part 2: Cech cohomology This seminar forms part of the York Mathematics Department Series of expository seminars for staff and students |
| 22 November Thursday 4.20pm | Gustav Delius (York) Quantum group symmetry in the boundary sine-Gordon model and soliton reflection amplitudes |
| 26 November Monday 4.20pm | John Loftin (Columbia) Toward a compactification of the moduli space of convex RP(2) surfaces |
| 3 December Monday 4.20pm | Atsushi Higuchi (York) The renormalization group This seminar forms part of the York Mathematics Department Series of expository seminars for staff and students |
| 10 December Monday 4.20pm | Chong-sun Chu (Durham) Aspects of noncommutative gauge theories |
| 13 December Thursday 4.20pm | Rafael Nepomechie (Miami) Supersymmetric integrable boundary QFT in 1+1 dimensions |
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| Mondays & Thursdays: | Talks start at 4:20 pm. They are preceeded by coffee and biscuits. The seminars are open ended but there will be a short break after about 50 minutes. They take place in the very relaxed atmosphere of Room V/131 in Vanbrugh College. |
| Wednesdays: | These are the Departmental Seminars and are supposed to be accessible to a general mathematics audience. They take place in room V/131, Vanbrugh College, at 4.00 pm. Tea will be available at 3.30 p.m. in the Senior Common Room, Vanbrugh College. |
Information on How to Reach the University is available. Vanbrugh College is building 25 on the campus map. Please contact Gustav Delius by e-mail if you need a parking permit or would like further information.
Please note that this is the tentative evolving program. It is advisable to re-check the page shortly before each talk. For further details or to be placed on the mailing list please contact Dr. B.S. Kay or Dr. G.W. Delius.
| 30 April Monday 4.20pm | Dr Konstantina Savvidou (Imperial) Time in histories theory |
| 3 May Thursday 4.20pm | Dr Pascal Baseilhac (York) Expectation values of descendent fields in integrable quantum field theories |
| 10 May Thursday 4.20pm | Dr Anastasia Doikou (York) Principal chiral model scattering and the alternating quantum spin chain |
| 16 May Wednesday 4.00pm | Professor Paul Glendinning (UMIST) On the unique expansion of numbers in non-integer bases: a dynamical systems approach |
| 17 May Thursday 4.20pm | Dr Rod Crewther (Adelaide) Why I want Yang-Mills topological charge to take non-integer values |
| 23 May Wednesday 4.00pm | Dr Alan Beardon (Cambridge) Continued Fractions: Old and New |
| 24 May Thursday 4.20pm | Professor Rex Godby (York) Many-body perturbation theory for electrons in real materials |
| 30 May Wednesday 4.00pm | Dr Martin Matthieu (Queen's, Belfast) Elementary Operators on Calkin Algebras |
| 31 May Thursday 4.20pm | Dr Chris Fewster (York) Quantum Inequalities for the Dirac Field |
| 6 June special time Wednesday 4.20pm | Ryu Sasaki (YITP, Kyoto University) Hierarchies of Spin Models related to Calogero-Moser Models (hep-th/0105197) |
| 7 June Thursday 4.20pm | Daniel Vanzella (Sao Paulo) Decay of accelerated protons and the Fulling-Davies-Unruh effect |
| 13 June Wednesday 4.00pm | Dr Julian Barbour The dynamics of pure shape |
| 14 June Thursday 4.20pm | Dr Julian Barbour Relativity without Relativity |
| 15 June special time Friday 11.30am | Dr Laszlo Feher (Szeged, Hungary) Interpretations and constructions of dynamical r-matrices |
| 28 June Thursday 4.20pm | Professor Peter Holdsworth (ENS Lyon) Spin liquides glasses and ice: degeneracy and degeneracy lifting in frustrated magnetism |
| 9 July special time Monday 4.20pm | Prof Larry Ford (Tufts) Where is the Negative Energy? - Constraints on Spatial Distributions of Negative Energy in Quantum Field Theory |
The topics include: Bäcklund transformations, Q-operator, separation of variables, integrable boundary conditions. The variety of techniques is illustrated on a few examples: Toda lattice, XXX magnetic chain, Calogero-Moser model.
Liouville-Arnold's definition of integrability. Isospectral transform method: Lax matrix. Lie-Poisson groups: r-matrix. Symplectic leaves of r-matrix Poisson bracket. XXX magnetic chain as the generic integrable model associated to the sl2-invariant r-matrix. Degenerations of XXX model: DST model, Toda lattice, Gaudin model.Quantization. Correspondence rules. Quantum canonical transformations: Fock formula. Quantum groups, Yangians. XXX magnetic chain, algebraic Bethe Ansatz.
Axioms of BT: algebraicity, locality, canonicity, commutativity (Veselov theorem), spectrality. General construction of BT for the models associated to the sl2-invariant r-matrix. Examples: Toda lattice, XXX chain, Calogero-Moser (Ruijsenaars) model.
History: motivations, Baxter's construction, Pasquier-Gaudin, Bazhanov-Lukianov-Zamolodchikov works. Relation of Q and BT.Q-operator for the XXX model --- a detailed study. Universal sl2-invariant R-matrix. Q-operator as trace of a monodromy matrix. 3 kinds of Q-operators. Factorization of the R-matrix and the Q-operator. Fusion and wronskian identities. Kernels and symbols of Q.
Definitions (classical and quantum case).Classical SoV. General construction: poles of the eigenvectors of the Lax matrix. Normalization problem. Examples: Toda lattice, XXX model, Calogero-Moser model.
Relation of SoV and BT (Q). SoV from BT (Kuznetsov-Sklyanin). BT from SoV (Kuznetsov-Vanhaecke).
Quantum SoV. Examples: Toda lattice, XXX model, Macdonald polynomials.
General construction based on exchange algebras. Comodules over quantum groups. Examples: XXX model, Toda lattice, Nonlinear Schröodinger equation.Bethe Ansatz, SoV, Q-operator for the systems with boundary.
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| Mondays & Thursdays: | Talks start at 4:20 pm. They are preceeded by coffee and biscuits. The seminars are open ended but there will be a short break after about 50 minutes. They take place in the very relaxed atmosphere of Room V/131 in Vanbrugh College (building 25 on campus map). |
| Wednesdays: | These are the Departmental Seminars and are supposed to be accessible to a general mathematics audience. They take place in room V/131, Vanbrugh College, at 4.00 pm. Tea will be available at 3.30 p.m. in the Senior Common Room, Vanbrugh College. |
| 11 January Thursday 4.20pm | Dr Roberto Tateo (Durham) Perturbed boundary conformal field theory and quantum mechanics |
| 15 January Monday 4.20pm | Spyros Kouris (York) Graviton two-point function in de Sitter space-time |
| 18 January Thursday 4.20pm | Clare Dunning (York) Ordinary differential equations and integrable quantum field theories |
| 22 January Monday 4.20pm | Dr Keith Anguige Isotropic Cosmological Singularities |
| 24 January Wednesday 4 pm | Dr Steven Bramwell (University College London) Universal Fluctuations in Correlated Systems |
| 25 January Thursday 4.20pm | Professor Dmitri Vassiliev (Bath) Spectral asymptotics for partial differential operators and microlocal analysis |
| 29 January Monday 4.20pm | Jason Szulc (York) Shor's factorisation algorithm |
| 31 January Wednesday 4 pm | Dr Benjamin Steinberg (Porto) What is partial symmetry? |
| 1 February Thursday 4.20pm | Dr Davide Fioravanti (Durham) DE RERUM NATURA id est THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING SYMMETRY |
| 7 February Wednesday 4 pm | Dr Paolo Papi (Rome) An overview on ad-nilpotent ideals of Borel subalgebras |
| 8 February Thurday 4.20pm | Dr Andrew Mathas (Sydney) Affine Hecke algebras, Ariki-Koike algebras and Fock spaces |
| 12 February Monday 4.20pm | Dr Clifford Johnson (Durham) Gauge Theory Dynamics from D-Brane Probes |
| 13 February Tuesday 10.15pm | Dr Evgueni Sklyanin (St. Petersburg) Note that this is not a regular seminar talk but a presentation in connection with the readership position in our group. |
| 14 February Wednesday 4 pm | Professor J Greenlees (Sheffield) Implausible equivalences and duality |
| 15 February Thurday 4.20pm | Dr Niall MacKay (York) Vibrations of symmetric molecules and the Buckyball |
| 19 February Monday 4.20pm | Professor Vladimir Rittenberg (Bonn) The two-component Burgers equation and applications to stochastic processes |
| 21 February Wednesday 4 pm | Professor A Veselov (Loughborough) Configurations of hyperplanes in integrable systems |
| 26 February Monday 4.20pm | Dr Vadim Kuznetsov (Leeds) Bäcklund transformations go digital |
| 28 February Wednesday 4 pm | Professor P Glendinning (UMIST) Postponed because of bad weather On the unique expansion of numbers in non-integer bases: a dynamical systems approach |
| 7 March Wednesday 4 pm | Dr M Dritschel (Newcastle-on-Tyne) to be announced |
| 7 March Thursday 4 pm | Professor Tony Sudbery (York) Groups, geometries and mechanics |
| 12 March Monday 4.20pm | Dr Konstantina Savvidou cancelled due to illness |
| 22 March Thursday 4.20pm | Professor Tohru Eguchi (Tokyo) String propagation on singular Calabi-Yau manifolds |
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Mathematical Physics Seminars |
| Days: | Mondays and Thursdays |
|---|---|
| Time: | talk at 4:15 pm, preceeded by coffee and biscuits The seminars are open ended but there will be a short break after about 50 minutes. |
| Location: | Mondays in room G/010 in Goodricke College (building 22 on campus map), Thursdays in V/131 in Vanbrugh College (building 25 on campus map) |
Other mathematical physics seminars take place in the Wednesday Departmental Seminar series and for convenience these too are listed in the programme below.
| Wednesday, 3 May: | Departmental Seminar at 4:00 in V/131 J-Y Thibou (Paris) Introduction to the Combinatorics of Ribbon Tableaux |
| Thursday, 4 May: | Niall MacKay (York) The Principal Chiral Model on the Half-Line |
| Monday, 8 May: | John Cardy (Oxford) Conformal Field Theory and Percolation |
| Wednesday, 10 May: | Departmental Seminar at 4.00 in V/131 T Sapatinas (Kent) An introduction to wavelet decomposition and shrinkage |
| Monday, 15 May: | Francois Englert (Brussels) The Fefferman-Graham ambiguity and the holographic principle |
| Wednesday, 17 May: | Departmental Seminar at 4:30 in V/131 Peter Phillips (Yale) Trends and Spurious Regression |
| Monday, 22 May: | Sergei Lukyanov (Rutgers) Finite temperature expectation values of local fields in the sinh-Gordon model |
| Wednesday, 24 May: | Departmental Seminar at 4:00 in V/131 Fran Burstall (Bath) Integrable systems in Conformable Geometry |
| Thursday, 25 May: | Reidun Twarock (York) An aperiodic analog to the Virasoro algebra via quasicrystal techniques |
| Wednesday, 31 May: | Departmental Seminar at 4:00 in V/131 Stephen Bramwall (University College London) Universal Fluctuations in Correlated Systems |
| Wednesday, 7 June: | Departmental Seminar at 4:00 in V/131 Michael Berry (Bristol) The architecture of diffraction catastrophes |
| Monday, 12 June: | Peter Goddard (Cambridge) An approach to Conformal Field Theory |
| Wednesday, 14 June: | Departmental Seminar at 4:00 in V/131 Paul Turner (Heriot-Watt) Homotopy Quantum Field Theories |
| Thursday, 22 June: | Don Marolf (Syracuse) String/M-Branes for relativists |
| Thursday, 29 June: | Tony Sudbery (York) Why Am I Me? and other interesting questions |
| Monday, 3 July: | Ryu Sasaki (Yukawa Institute, Kyoto) The Quantum Calogero-Moser Model |
| Monday, 10 July: | AM Semikhatov (Lebedev and Durham) Integrable Representations as Collective (``Quasiparticle'') Excitations |
Monday seminars take place at 4.15 in room G/010
| 17 January: | Chris Fewster Quantum Inequalities from Microlocal Analysis |
| 24 January: | Liu Zhao 2-Parameter Deformations of Affine Lie Algebras |
| 31 January: | Pascal Baseilhac From Reflection Amplitudes to Vacuum Expectation Values in Integrable Quantum Field Theories I |
| 7 February: | Spyros Kouris Large Distance Behaviour of the Linearized Gravity Two-Point Function in De Sitter Spacetime |
| 14 February: | Ian McIntosh Toda Systems and their Poisson Structures: the Co-adjoint Orbit Method I |
| 21 February: | Ian McIntosh Toda Systems and their Poisson Structures: the Co-adjoint Orbit Method II |
| 28 February: | Ian McIntosh Toda Systems and their Poisson Structures: the Co-adjoint Orbit Method III |
| 6 March: | Katrin Wendland (Bonn) (Crystallographic) Orbifold Conformal Field Theories |
| 13 March: | Everyone Informal Discussion on Quantum Gravity |
| 20 March: | Hilary Carteret (York) {|Local Symmetry properties of three-particle pure states> + |Local Symmetry properties of multi-particle pure states>}/sqrt(2) |
Thursday seminars take place at 4.15 in room V/131 (preceded by coffee at 4.00 in V/135).
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| Mondays & Thursdays: | Talks start at 4:20 pm. They are preceeded by coffee and biscuits. The seminars are open ended but there will be a short break after about 50 minutes. They take place in the very relaxed atmosphere of Room V/131 in Vanbrugh College (building 25 on campus map). |
| Wednesdays: | These are the Departmental Seminars and are supposed to be accessible to a general mathematics audience. They take place in room V/131, Vanbrugh College, at 4.00 pm. Tea will be available at 3.30 p.m. in the Senior Common Room, Vanbrugh College. |
| 12 October Thursday 4.20pm | Phil Isaac (Brisbane) Quantum Lie Algebras This will be a generally accessible talk about quantum groups and quantum Lie algebras |
| 16 October Monday 4.20pm | Prof. John Roberts (Rome) Theory of Superselection Sectors |
| 30 October Monday 4.20pm | Brett Gibson (York) Boundary Breathers in the sine-Gordon model on the half line |
| 2 November Thursday 4.20pm | Dr Dirk Kreimer (Mainz) From the combinatorics of Feynman diagrams to running physical parameters |
| 8 November Wednesday 4pm | Cancelled because of flooding: Dr M Dritschel (Newcastle-upon-Tyne) |
| 9 November Thursday 5:15pm room: V/045 | Dr Chris Fewster (York) Open Lecture: A crash course in quantum mechanics This is part of a lecture series for non-scientists starting immediately after our usual seminar slot. |
| 15 November Wednesday 4pm | Dr Stephen Bramwall (University College London) Postponed because of flooding |
| 16 November Thursday 4:20pm | Dr Ruediger Schack (Royal Holloway) Postponed because of flooding |
| 20 November Monday 4:20pm | Dr Lucien Hardy (C.Q.C. Oxford) Can quantum theory be obtained from reasonable axioms? |
| 22 November Wednesday 4pm | Professor P C Chatwin (Sheffield) Aspects of the only unsolved problem of classical physics |
| 23 November Thursday 5:15pm room: V/045 | Dr Chris Fewster (York) Open Lecture: Neither here nor there but both: the central mystery of quantum mechanics This is part of a lecture series for non-scientists starting immediately after our usual seminar slot. |
| 29 November Wednesday | Yorkshire Differential Geometry Day |
| 30 November Thursday 5:15pm V/045 | Professor Tony Sudbery (York) Open Lecture: Putting weirdness to work: quantum information and quantum computing This is part of a lecture series for non-scientists starting immediately after our usual seminar slot. |
| 4 December Monday 4:20pm | Dr Michael Roesgen (Bonn) Applications of (essential) paths in conformal field theory |
| 6 December Wednesday 4pm | Dr James Vickers (Southampton) How to multiply distributions |
| 7 December Thursday 4:20pm | Dr Ruediger Schack (Royal Holloway) Generalized measurements and quantum Bayes rule |
| 11 December Monday 4:20pm | Dr David Rideout (Syracuse) A Stochastic Growth Dynamics for Causal Sets |
| 25 October: | 5-minute minitalks by F. Cornish, T. Brzezinski, E. Corrigan, G. Delius, C. Fewster, A. Higuchi, B. Kay, I. McIntosh, M. Nazarov, A. Sudbery. |
| 1 November: | Gustav Delius Conformal Field Theory I |
| 8 November: | Tomasz Brzezinski Algebraic Bethe Ansatz I |
| 15 November: | Gustav Delius Conformal Field Theory II |
| 22 November: | Tomasz Brzezinski Algebraic Bethe Ansatz II |
| 29 November: | Gustav Delius Conformal Field Theory III |
| 6 December: | Ed Corrigan The ADHM Construction I |
| 13 December: | Ed Corrigan The ADHM Construction II |
| 21 October: | Elizabeth Winstanley (Oxford) Black holes, infinite hair and anti-de Sitter space |
| 3 November: | free discussions |
| 11 November: | Maxim Nazarov (York) Reflection equation and classical Lie algebras |
| 18 November: | Christopher Fewster (York) A general quantum inequality |
| 25 November: | Tomasz Brzezinski (York) Algebraic Bethe Ansatz III: Solving the Bethe equations |
| 2 December: | Vadim Kuznetsov (Leeds) Bäcklund transformations for classical and quantum integrable systems |
| 9 December: | Nicholas Dorey (Swansea) title tba |
I gave three introductory lectures on conformal field theory:
Obviously I only scratched the surface. I recommend the following for further reading:
The links point to a local copy of the scanned versions of the papers stored at KEK.
A full list of publications by all members of the Department is also available.
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.
Ed Corrigan has been investigating the properties of defects and boundaries in integrable (but not conformal) field theories with a view to classifying all possibilities. This is an extensive project with many facets. Some of the ideas and techniques are algebraic in flavour, others analytical, but most are novel and there are a number of areas suitable for development by a PhD student.
Niall MacKay works principally on algebraic aspects of quantum integrability, and is happy to supervise students on the hidden symmetry algebras (typically Yangians and other 'quantum groups') of integrable models, their representations and particle content. Most projects are suitable for students with an MSc-level background in theoretical physics (including strings, supersymmetry, QFT etc.), but some are more algebraic and may be suitable for pure mathematicians with an interest in mathematical physics. Past and current students have worked on: boundary scattering in AdS/CFT; the Yang-Baxter equation and invariant tensors of exceptional Lie groups; twist-deformed manifolds and cosmology; conserved charges in supergroup sigma models; boundary scattering in principal chiral models; quantum affine Toda solitons.
Niall has also recently developed an interest in the mathematical modelling of warfare, and has published papers on Lanchester theory, especially in its historical context. Possible research projects would be in this area and in the mathematical modelling of counter-insurgent warfare.
Henning Bostelmann is interested in the mathematical foundations of physics; specifically, of relativistic quantum physics (quantum field theory). While quantum field theory is a well established topic since more than 50 years, its mathematically rigorous description, in particular of its non-perturbative aspects, is still largely incomplete. He analyses these questions using advanced methods of functional analysis (operator algebras).
Topics that he is working on, and has worked on, include: the short-distance scaling limit of quantum field theories; the relation between pointlike observables (quantum fields) and bounded observables in open regions; the covariant formulation of these for quantum theories on curved spacetime, i.e., in a gravitational background.
Chris Fewster works on the mathematically rigorous formulation of quantum field theory in curved spacetimes (QFT in CST). In this theory, the propagation of the quantum fields is affected by the curvature of spacetime, but (usually) one neglects the "back-reaction" effect of the quantum fields on the spacetime. He has supervised seven PhD students in this area, with two main foci:
Quantum energy inequalities Unlike most classical forms of matter, quantum fields can have local energy densities that are negative. However, quantum field theory contains mechanisms (deeply connected to the uncertainty principle) that result in the energy density not being too negative on average. These mechanisms are expressed by results called Quantum Energy Inequalities (QEIs). Chris Fewster has supervised a number of PhD students on these questions. Simon Dawson (PhD 2006) investigated numerical QEIs and also produced the first closed-form expression for QEIs for the Dirac field in CST. Calvin Smith (PhD 2006) obtained the first "absolute" QEIs in CST, while Lutz Osterbrink (PhD 2007) found the first QEIs applicable to the nonminimally coupled scalar field. An introduction to QEIs and some of the related techniques can be found in Chris Fewster's lecture notes.
Locally covariant QFT Quantum field theory in Minkowski space depends in many ways on the high degree of spacetime symmetry. General curved spacetimes lack any symmetry at all, which makes it hard to prove general statements about general quantum field theories (as opposed to specific models). A major development was the introduction by Brunetti, Fredenhagen and Verch of a locally covariant formulation of QFT in CST based on techniques of category theory. Chris Fewster's former student Ko Sanders (PhD 2008), and current students Matthew Ferguson and Benjamin Lang have worked on various aspects of locally covariant QFT, including the proof of a Reeh-Schlieder theorem and the formulation of the Dirac field (Sanders), and the dynamical locality of the extension of scalar field theory to incorporate Wick polynomials (Ferguson).
In addition, Chris Fewster is interested in other aspects of QFT in flat and curved spacetime. Recently, with David Hunt (PhD 2012) he studied the quantization of linearized gravity on background spacetimes solving the Einstein equations with cosmological constant, thus making contact with Atsushi Higuchi's work (see elsewhere on this page).
You will have the opportunity to investigate topics in non-relativistic quantum mechanics with Stefan Weigert. The problems he is interested in are often motivated by questions currently addressed in quantum information.
In recent years, the properties of so-called mutually unbiased bases have attracted considerable interest in the quantum information community. Expressing complementarity of variables in quantum mechanics, they naturally give rise to fundamental questions about finite quantum mechanical systems, i.e. quantum systems accomodating a finite number of states. Recent PhD projects in this field have been based on analytic, numerical and computer-aided calculations.
Paul Busch's main research interest is the development of the operational tools of quantum measurement theory and their application to the solution of conceptual problems and the modeling of practical measurement schemes. One strand of current work is concerned with structural aspects of finite-dimensional quantum systems (qudits), specifically the search for measures of approximation and degrees of unsharpness of quantum observables. Possible topics for PhD projects include the question of the connection between approximate joint measurability and approximate quantum cloning and the implications of these and other quantum measurement limitations for quantum information processing. Another possible project area is that of relativistic quantum measurements (covariant collapse, localisation vs. causality).
Classical and quantum electrodynamics are very old subjects and have been studied extensively. However, it has not been clear how the former is obtained as a classical limit of the latter in radiation processes. Working with a student, Giles Martin (PhD, 2008), he established that the classical back-reaction force on a radiating charged particle can be obtained as the classical limit from quantum electrodynamics (QED). He and Phil Walker (PhD, 2011) have calculated a quantum correction to the classical Larmor formula for the energy emitted from an accelerated charged particle. He is planning to extend his work on the semi-classical approximation in quantum field theory to radiation processes in curved spacetime and also apply it to gravitational radiation.
Quantum field theory in de Sitter spacetime, which is relevant to inflationary cosmology, is believed to solve various puzzles in the big-bang cosmology. Atsushi Higuchi has supervised four PhD students in this area. With Spyros Kouris (PhD, 2003) he worked on constructing the two-parameter family of covariant propagators for gravitational waves, which will be useful in studying the gravitational fluctuation in this spacetime. With Richard Weeks (PhD, 2005) he found that the long-distance quantum correlation of quantum gravitational fluctuation is weaker than some physicists have suspected. With Yen Cheong Lee (PhD, 2010) he demonstrated how the retarded Green’s function can be used in de Sitter spacetime – there had been some confusion about this in the literature – and started investigating interacting field theory in this spacetime. With Mir Faizal (PhD, 2011) he worked on some aspects of interacting quantum gauge theory and perturbative quantum gravity. He is planning to work further on various aspects of interacting quantum field theory in de Sitter spacetime in the next few years.
Visitors to the Mathematical Physics group
| Visitor | Home institution |
Visit dates |
Host |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dr Andrei Babichenko | Weizmann Institute | September 1, 2012 - March 31, 2013 | Dr Niall MacKay |
| Prof TA Roman | Central Connecticut State University | June 7, 2010 - June 18, 2010 | Dr Chris Fewster |
| Dr Gandalf Lechner | University of Vienna | May 30, 2010 - June 6, 2010 | Dr Henning Bostelmann |
| Professor Ingemar Bengtsson | Stockholm University, Sweden | May 23, 2010 - May 29, 2010 | Dr Stefan Weigert |
| Professor Heinz-Jurgen Schmidt | Universitaet Osnabrueck | May 3, 2009 - May 16, 2009 | Professor Paul Busch |
| Professor MJ Pfenning | US Military Academy, West Point, USA | June 16, 2008 - July 4, 2008 | Dr Chris Fewster |
| Dr Henning Bostelmann | University of Rome Tor Vergata | May 18, 2008 - May 24, 2008 | Dr Chris Fewster |