IR-conformal dynamics in SU(2) gauge theories with adjoint fermions
An urgent question in Particle Physics is related to the possible existence of new interactions beyond the Standard Model. The existence of those interactions is strongly suggested by currently open problems such as the nature of Dark Matter and the naturalness of the measured value of the Higgs mass.…
The Occam’s razor equation
This equation is science in a nutshell. On the left-hand-side it has the Bayesian Evidence. This is the quantity which is responsible for updating our belief in a scientific model in light of data (for example, how much we believe in the concordance model of cosmology in light of…
Nested sampling beyond Bayesian statistics
Nested sampling is a numerical tool widely used in cosmology for performing Bayesian data analysis: using astrophysical data and models of the universe to extract parameters such as its age and its size, as well as to numerically determine which model is preferred by the data. This paper [2105.13923]…
Composite Higgs Phenomenology at the LHC
Understanding the nature of the Standard Model Higgs boson is still an open problem. An appealing possibility is that the Higgs boson be a composite particle resulting from a novel strong interaction. The lack of observation of otherwise unexplained particles interacting through this conjectured novel force and with mass…
Performing the First Resolution Study for Primordial Star Formation Simulations
The Population III initial mass function (IMF) is currently unknown, but recent studies agree that fragmentation of primordial gas gives a broader IMF than the initially suggested singular star per halo. In this study we introduce sink particle mergers into the moving mesh code Arepo, to perform the first…
Likelihood-free inference with Dark Energy Survey Y3 data
Project summary: Using optimised “active learning’’ to efficiently sample the cosmological model space, we will generate a suite of simulated catalogues of mock Dark Energy Survey (DES) data. These mock data are the primary input (along with the actual observed data) to the DES likelihood-free inference pipeline. This pipeline…
Solar Energetic Particle propagation in the 3D heliosphere
diffusion-based model (Laitinen et al 2016) of SEP propagation from the Sun (yellow dot in the middle) as guided by Parker spiral (black curve). During solar eruptions, charged particles are accelerated to relativistic energies. These solar energetic particles (SEPs) propagate through the interplanetary space to Earth and cause a…
Tracing the small-scale structure of the cosmic web over 12 billion years
The intergalactic medium (IGM) is the rarefied material that spans the vast distances between galaxies in the Universe. In our DiRAC thematic project, we model the ionisation and thermal structure of the IGM using a combination of hydrodynamical structure formation simulations and GPU accelerated radiative transfer. The results form…
Transport properties of finite-density SU(2) lattice gauge theory
Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) is a fundamental theory of nuclear interactions, describing nucleons as composite states of quarks and gluons. Heavy-ion collision experiments create a very hot and dense phase of nuclear matter, in which nucleons melt into a quark-gluon plasma. With more than 100 nucleons participating in each collision,…
Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking in the 3d Thirring Model
PI: Simon Hands, University of Liverpool The Thirring Model describes relativistic fermions moving in a two-dimensional plane and interacting via a contact term between covariantly conserved currents. The physical system it most resembles is that of low-energy electronic excitations in graphene. For free electrons at half-filling on a honeycomb…
Evidence for violations of Cosmic Censorship in black-hole collisions in higher dimensions
Physics is the attempt to describe, predict and understand a vast range of phenomena in nature, — ranging from elementary particles to the entire Universe — in terms of mathematical expressions and equations. One of the most astonishing physical theories is Einstein’s general relativity (GR) that describes the gravitational…
Heating and Acceleration through Magnetic Reconnection in Space Plasma Turbulence
The nature of the processes responsible for the dissipation of energy in collisionless plasmas is an important open challenge in the field of space and astrophysical plasma physics. The solar wind is a prime example of a collisionless space plasma. Despite our efforts to measure these processes with spacecraft…
Numerical Simulations of Extreme Encounters of Stars with Supermassive Black Holes
Based on Norman, Nixon & Coughlin (2021, ApJ 923 184) This research, led by undergraduate student Sarah Norman, presents numerical simulations of extreme encounters of stars with supermassive black holes. When a star gets sufficiently close to a supermassive black hole, the tidal field of the black hole can…
Kinematic signatures of gravitational instability
Young stars are born surrounded by cold discs or dust and gas. These discs act as a conduit for accretion of mass on to the central star, and also provide the raw material for planet formation. At early times these discs are thought to be sufficiently massive that they…
Decays of an exotic 1-+ hybrid meson resonance in QCD
Using cutting-edge lattice Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) methods, in a recent calculation [Phys. Rev. D103, 054502 (2021), arXiv:2009.10034] we demonstrated the presence of an exotic hybrid meson resonance for the first time. The results suggest that it is related to the resonance observed by the COMPASS experiment at CERN. Most…
Fundamental Physics from Strong Gravity
This project continues our work to characterise the behaviour of light fields in strong gravity environments, in particular focussing on the potential for gravitational wave signatures from dark matter, exotic compact objects and the possible formation of primordial black holes. A key highlight this year was an investigation of…
Proving a 40-year-old conjecture using lattice simulations
This project is focused on the study of field theories relevant for building holographic cosmological models. These models propose to use hypothetical theories dual to the unknown laws of gravity in the early universe and predict observable phenomena such as the cosmic microwave background (CMB). This allows to provide…
Exoplanet Science at Imperial
Project – Exoplanet Demographics In recent years, a bimodal distribution has been observed in the sizes of small, close-in exoplanets, often referred to as the ‘radius gap’. Currently there are two atmospheric evolution models which can provide explanations as to how the radius gap may arise, namely XUV photoevaporation and…
Understanding the Galaxy-Halo Connection Using the Simba Simulation
Romeel Davé, PI The Concordance Cosmological Model predicts the properties and distribution of dark matter halos with exceptional precision. However, how these halos come to be populated with the diversity of galaxies that we observe remains unclear. A curious recent observational result shows that at a given halo mass,…
Collisional ionisation and recombination effects in partially ionised plasma
Project dp050 PI: A. Hillier, Research by G. Murtas Plasmoid-mediated fast magnetic reconnection plays a fundamental role in driving explosive dynamics such as chromospheric jets (Shibata et al. 2007, Singh et al. 2012) and heating in the solar chromosphere, but relatively little is known about how it develops in…
Ionisation by non-thermal particles in thermonuclear supernovae
Luke Shingles, Stuart Sim, Christine CollinsAstrophysics Research Centre, Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) originate from the thermonuclear explosions of white dwarf stars. Understanding these events is important to astronomy since their brightness means they can be used to study cosmological expansion, and they are…
HPQCD: the charming strangeness of the W boson
Figure 1. When the D meson emits a W boson to become a K meson, the underlying process is a charm quark transition to a strange quark. The coupling between c, s and W is called Vcs. Theorists in the HPQCD collaboration have pinned down Vcs, a key parameter…
The first cosmological simulations of a dwarf galaxy with magnetic fields, radiative transfer and cosmic rays
Amongst many different galaxy types, dwarf galaxies are certainly some of the most mysterious and intriguing systems. They lie at the heart of multiple unanswered questions in galaxy formation and have fuelled a number of controversies, the so-called `small-scale’ challenges to our standard cosmological model, the ΛCDM. These challenges…
Quantum Electrodynamics meets Quantum Chromodynamics
The Standard Model (SM) of Elementary Particles has been extremely successful in correctly predicting and describing the properties of elementary particles studied at experimental facilities all around the world. The SM itself covers elementary particles such as quarks and electrons, for instance, and their anti-particles, which interact by means…
SIBELIUS-DARK: a galaxy catalogue of the Local Volume from a constrained realisation simulation
Stuart McAlpine, John Helly, Matthieu Schaller, Till Sawala, Guilhem Lavaux, Jens Jasche, Carlos Frenk, Adrian Jenkins, John Lucey and Peter Johansson Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2022, tmp.348M Over the past thirty years cosmologists have developed a standard model of cosmology — Lambda Cold Dark Matter (LCDM)…
(π0,η,η’) mass splittings and mixings
A particularly challenging topic in the phenomenological study of QCD is the (π0,η,η’) particle mass splittings and mixings. With exact SU(3) flavour symmetry of the u, d and s quarks, the decomposition of the familiar eigenstates of the π0,η,η’ is known. However, when SU(3) and isospin are broken due…
FLAMINGO — A large suite of state-of-the-art galaxy cluster simulations for emulations for high-precision cosmology
Leads: Ian McCarthy, Joop Schaye, Matthieu Schaller, Willem Elbers, and the Virgo II Team A diverse set of new observatories are about to map the large-scale structure in the Universe down to smaller scales than was possible before, which will greatly improve our ability to find inconsistencies in the…
Model independent modified gravity N-body simulations
The assumption that General Relativity is the fundamental law of gravity requires an extrapolation of many orders of magnitude from solar system length scales where the theory is well tested. This uncertainty undergirds explorations of modified gravity theories, which are further motivated by the possibility of explaining dark energy…