Research Activities/Interests of the Theory Group

University of Tasmania - Central Mall. From UTAS Magazine, published by the University.

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Group : Prof R Delbourgo, Dr P D Jarvis, Dr D-S Liu, Dr I Tsohantjis and research students.

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Summary

The Theoretical Physics Group forms part of the Physics Department and carries out research work in High Energy Physics with a particular emphasis on symmetry properties of elementary particles and quantum field gauge theories.

The group provides a supportive and friendly environment for research into theoretical physics. The broad interests of the group are reflected in the range of topics supervised in recent years, ranging from quantum electrodynamics in D dimensions, theoretical and experimental work on model dynamical systems to Bell’s theorem and the foundations of quantum theory and path integral methods in quantum mechanics.

Postgraduate Projects

At MSc and PhD level, research projects centre on gauge theory and supersymmetry, which embraces all physically accepted theories: quantum electrodynamics (electromagnetic forces), chromodynamics (the colour force between quarks), flavourdynamics (weak and hadronic forces between hadrons) and gravitation (in the context of general relativity). The theory group has a well-established international reputation and can offer supervision of interesting research programs in these subjects and in related areas of mathematical physics. Typically, students become conversant with the required groundwork in their first few months by informal study and by attending occasional lecture series offered by members of the group, before focussing fully on their own topic.

The background material introduces students to aspects of quantum field theory and applications of group theory to particle physics. Concepts like relativistic symmetry, the gauge principle for unification of forces, perturbative and non-perturbative methods, dimensional continuation of reduction, (super-)Lie algebras, the role of anticommuting coordinates for the classification of particles and their interactions, conformal symmetry.

Theoretical work recently undertaken includes:

• Dimensional continuation and its application to odd-dimensional field theories.
• Gauge theories in 2+1 dimensions, including Chern-Simons terms.
• Closed forms for low-energy gauge interactions and quantum anomalies, in any dimension.
• Grassmann coordinates for classification of particle generations and their interactions
• Space-time supersymmetries and their application to constrained quantization. Supersymmetric generalised wave equations.
• Representations of inhomogeneous orthosymplectic superalgebras; their relation to physical models and the BRST structure of gauge theories.
• Theory of symmetric functions. Applications to combinatorics, and the realization of conformal and Kac-Moody (super)algebras.
• Theory of electronic stopping in heavy ion channelling.
• Fundmental tests of quantum physics and relativity.
• Heavy flavour physics, in particular CP violation and FCNC for B-decays.
• Heavy quark symmetries and heavy quark effective field theory.
• Covariant wave functions for supermultiplets of mesons and baryons.
• Chiral symmetry, light flavours and dynamical symmetry-breaking.
• Renormalization and regularization in left-right asymmetric quantum field theories.
• Integral representations for 2-loop amplitudes in the standard model.
• Algebraic structures of infinities in renormalizable theories and their connection to knot theory. Braid structures and field theory.
• Universal features and relationships in one-dimensional maps.