Embark on a cosmic journey into the heart of theoretical physics with the weekly talks at ETH, organised by students for students!
Delve into the theoretical physics of the quantum realm, cosmological wonders, condensed matter systems, information, mathematics and more!
We will hear from Professors, Postdocs and PhD students sharing their research and experiences in their daily lives as theoretical physicists, the challenges they face, and the exhilarating breakthroughs that drive their fields forward.
The talks are intended to be accessible to physics students in their master’s or in higher semesters of their bachelor’s degree.
Where:
ETH Hönggerberg
HIT E 41.1*
When:
Tuesdays during the semester at 17:30*
*most of the time. You can find the place and time below for every talk individually.
You can find recordings of past talks here on the ETH Videoportal.
Do you want to recommend a speaker or are you interested in giving a talk yourself? Then contact us via Mail. We’re happy to hear from you!
Upcoming Talk
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![Facets of Integr[abil]ity](https://theorytalks.ethz.ch/wp-content/uploads/sites/42/2024/11/beisert.person_image-e1731365358762.jpeg)
Facets of Integr[abil]ity
Prof. Dr. Niklas Beisert – Professor of the Quantum Field Theory and Strings group at ITP, ETH Zurich Integrability is a powerful feature of distinguished models in theoretical physics which makes their observables accessible to exact computational methods. These abstract methods founded in complex analysis…
Past Talks
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Positivity bounds on electromagnetic properties of media
Borna Salehian – Postdoc at ETH Zurich We study the constraints imposed on the electromagnetic response of general media by microcausality (commutators of local fields vanish outside the light cone) and positivity of the imaginary parts (the medium can only absorb energy from the external…
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Almost-i.i.d. States
Giulia Mazzola – PhD student in QIT group, ETH Zurich A common assumption in physics is that the same experiment can be repeated many times independently. More precisely, one often assumes that different rounds of an experiment can be described by independent and identically distributed…
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Quick Talks
Apostolos Giovanakis, Guglielmo Gigante, Yiyuan Chen – MSc students at ETH Zurich Electroweak Baryogenesis in the Standard Model and Beyond – Apostolos Giovanakis The matter-antimatter asymmetry in the Universe remains one of the most profound mysteries in cosmology and particle physics. Electroweak baryogenesis is a mechanism in…
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Freezing and Shielding under Global Quenches
Daniel Arrufat Vicente – PhD student at ETH Zurich Systems with strong non-local interactions exhibit a rich variety of out-of-equilibrium phenomena. One of the distinctive features of classical systems is the emergence of pre-thermal phases, known as quasi-stationary states (QSSs), whose lifetimes grow with system…
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Where is information localised?
Carla Ferradini – PhD student in QIT group, ETH Zurich “Information is Physical” and, at any point in time, physical systems occupy space. Hence, information, being a physical system itself, must also have a location in spacetime. It may seem straightforward to assign a spacetime…
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Positivity Bounds on Effective Field Theories
Matteo Delladio – PhD student ETH Zurich Nearly two decades ago, Adams et al. (2006) demonstrated that the locality and unitarity of UV completions impose surprising constraints on the Wilson coefficients of otherwise healthy-looking, Lorentz-invariant effective field theories. Since then, the field has made significant…
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Quantum Fields on Classical Computers
Dr. Tim Harris – Postdoc at ITP, ETH Zurich I will start by briefly attempting to answer the questions who? what? when? where? why? about lattice field theory. As you shall hopefully see, the lattice approach gives us a unique way to define quantum field…
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Precision Higgs Physics
Prof. Dr. Charalampos Anastasiou – Professor at D-PHYS, ETH Zurich The Higgs particle is the subject of intense experimentation. I will discuss some of our expectations for what we can learn from studying it. Alongside experiments, theory is crucial to deciphering the meaning of Higgs…
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Language Models for the Simulation of Quantum Many-Body Systems
Prof. Dr. Juan Carrasquilla Alvarez – Associate Professor at D-PHYS, ETH Zurich In this talk, I will discuss our work on using models inspired by natural language processing in the realm of quantum many-body physics. I will demonstrate their utility in solving ground states of…
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Quantum field theory and strings: a challenge for modern particle physics
Dr. Johannes Brödel – Senior Scientist at D-PHYS, ETH Zurich While there are still numerous mathematical challenges for particle physicists when calculating scattering amplitudes for the explanation and confirmation of results measured at modern particle accelerators, the theoretical development of quantum field theory and even…
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Universality in long-range quantum systems
Prof. Dr. Nicolò Defenu – Assistant Professor at ETH Zurich Dive into the fascinating realm of quantum systems, the seminar will offer a panoramic view of long-range interactions. Starting with a encompassing tour of critical phenomena in systems featuring power-law interactions 1/r^α at α <…
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New Windows on the Universe through Gravitational Waves
Dr. Davide Racco – Postdoc at ETH and UZH In 2015, the first observations of the gravitational waves emitted by the merger of two black holes occurred 1.4 billion years ago, marked the first direct measurement of these spacetime ripples, and the beginning of the…
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The Physics of Randomness
Prof. Dr. Ramona Wolf – Junior Professor at University of Siegen (Germany) Can you define the term “randomness”? Do you think you know the difference between a classical and a quantum random number generator? Given the fundamental quantum nature of our universe, what even is…
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Quench dynamics in topological and non-Hermitian systems
Karin Sim – PhD student at ETH Out of equilibrium systems are gaining increasing attention in the physics community due to their novel properties compared to their staticcounterpart. In particular, quantum quench is an established method to probe various aspects of out of equilibrium physics,…
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The daily life of a mathematical physicist
Alessandro Tarantola – PhD student at ETH Have you ever wondered where “generalized eigenstates” live, if not in the Hilbert space? Do you often feel uncomfortable exchanging sums and integrals? Are you uneasy if you think something is ill-defined? If so, mathematical physics might be…
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Transformations between perfect and imperfect quantum reference frames
Sébastien Garmier – PhD student in QIT group (Prof. Renato Renner) at ETH Abstract Any observer performing a measurement does so relative to a physical system serving as a reference frame, which, when treated quantum-mechanically, leads to the notion of quantum reference frames. Starting with…
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The road to the Ultraviolet: Effective Field Theories in Particle Physics
Dr. Achilleas Lazopoulos – Senior Scientist at the Particle Physics group of ITP, ETHZ Abstract Our quest for an ultimate theory of elementary particles is taking a new turn as the Large Hadron Collider goes on inspecting the structure of the microscopic world at the…
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Testing Quantum Theory With Thought Experiments
Prof. Dr. Renato Renner – Professor at the ETH Institute for Theoretical Physics Abstract According to quantum theory, objects can be in states without classical analogues. For example, in the famous double-slit experiment, a particle may be in a superposition of passing through two different…