(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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
HPQCD: the charming strangeness of the W boson
Theorists in the HPQCD collaboration have pinned down Vcs, a key parameter of the Standard Model, using STFC’s DIRAC Data Intensive supercomputer at Cambridge. Vcs is determined from combining the...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
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...
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....
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...
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...
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...
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...
Solar Energetic Particle propagation in the 3D heliosphere
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 serious Space Weather hazard to...
Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking in the 3d Thirring Model ’21
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...