When the M meets the P at IRMP (2nd edition)

Thursday 17 Dec 2015, 15:00 → 19:30 Europe/Brussels

CYCL01 (Cyclotron)

Fabio Maltoni (UCL), Marino Gran (UCL)

As it was already the case for the first edition of the « When the « M » meets the « P » at the IRMP » that took place on May 27, 2014, the idea is to bring together the mathematical and physical souls of our Institute. This year Prof. Pierre-Emmanuel Caprace (UCLouvain-IRMP) and Prof. Christopher White (Univ. Glasgow) have kindly accepted to give colloquia on topics of common interest. The presentations will be accessible to both mathematicians and physicists, to PhD students as well as to more senior researchers. In addition, after the seminars, we will hold a poster session where PhD students with 2+ years of experience as well as the researchers who completed their PhD in 2015 at the IRMP will have the opportunity to present a topic of their current research. M. Gran and F. Maltoni

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Poster participants Poster participants

Kac-Moody groups and causality: Speaker: Pierre-Emmanuel Caprace (UCLouvain)

The theory of Kac-Moody groups originates in the abstract construction, by generators and relations, of a family of infinite-dimensional Lie algebras over the complex numbers, made independently by Viktor Kac and Robert Moody in 1968. Somewhat unexpectedly, profound connections between those mathematical objects and gravity theories were revealed in the past two decades by the work of Thibault Damour, Marc Henneaux, Hermann Nicolai and others. The goal of this introductory talk is to highlight the mathematical challenges that emerge from those surprising connections.

Quarks, gluons and combinatorics: Speaker: Christopher White (Univ. Glasgow)

Quarks and gluons are the constituents of protons and neutrons, as well as many other particles in nature. The theory describing them, Quantum Chromodynamics, remains a highly active area of research worldwide, due to applications at particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Recently, an interesting mathematical object (called a web mixing matrix) has been discovered, that underlies gluon radiation from fast-moving particles. It has a purely combinatorial definition, and can be studied without any prior physics knowledge. In this talk, I will review where web mixing matrices come from, including their mathematical properties. Recent interdisciplinary work between particle physicists and pure mathematicians will also be described, showing that web mixing matrices have initiated a useful dialogue between two very different communities, involving new results on both sides.

Young IRMP Researchers Poster Session

Reception