Student Abstracts
Presentations
Noah Chulu Chinn
Fusion Forward: Simulating the Path to Limitless Energy
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A light-hearted presentation detailing the history and current status of nuclear fusion. Then going into my own work in the field of computational plasma physics; simulating a 'Tokamak' fusion experiment using Supercomputer.
Bethan Turner
Higher time derivative field theories from rotated integrable systems
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Theories that are higher derivative in time are usually thought to be unsuitable as physical theories due to instabilities arising as a result of Ostrogradsky's theorem, which appears at both a classical and quantum level. However they do have a number of interesting properties, such as they tend to be renormalisable, so they have been studied extensively, often with the aim of seeing if there is a way to "live with" Ostrogradsky's instability. Higher charges of integrable systems offer a systematic way to generate higher derivative field theories. The Kortweg De-Vries equation has an infinite number of conserved charges, treating these higher charges as Hamiltonians and then rotating the resulting equations of motion gives us an interesting class of higher derivative theories to study.
Talha Shameen
Long-range detection of alpha particles
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A look at the current state of the long-range detection of alpha radiation project at Queen Mary University of London
Ann-Kristin Malz
Modelling Gravitational Wave Detector Noise with Machine Learning
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Gravitational wave data are contaminated by non-Gaussian noise transients, 'glitches', obstructing the analysis of signals from astrophysical sources. To mitigate the effect, we use machine learning in the form of normalising flows to model and hence remove the glitches. We train a normalising flow on known glitches and create a parameterised glitch model. This model is then included alongside the signal model when performing bayesian inference on the data, allowing us to simultaneously fit glitch and signal. Our preliminary results show that the developed glitch model successfully removes the glitches from the data and significantly improves the inference of the source mass parameters. Further analyses are still in progress to continue improving the model, however, the results obtained thus far are promising and demonstrate the potential of normalising flow-based glitch models.
Levi Evans
A Top Friendship: Searching for ttH(->bb) at ATLAS with Transformer Networks
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The exploration of the Higgs boson's properties and its interactions with top quarks constitutes a pivotal aspect of the post-Higgs discovery era. Among these, the measurement of the associated production of a Higgs boson with a pair of top quarks (ttH) offers a unique window into the Yukawa coupling between the Higgs and the top quark, the heaviest known fundamental particle. This talk presents the latest search strategies for ttH production, with the Higgs boson decaying into a pair of bottom quarks (H→bb). A key focus is placed on improved MVA techniques, which incorporate permutation-invariant architectures utlising attention mechanisms, for enhancements in both multi-class classification of signal and background events, and Higgs candidate reconstruction.
Lightning talks
Licheng Zhang
Muon spectroscopy used in Organic semiconductors
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Muon ALC technique used in the spin dynamic of TADF materials (OLED).
Maddie Silcock
Exploring Obscured Supermassive Black Holes in the Early Universe with BEAGLE-AGN and JWST
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Supermassive black holes (SMBHs) are known to affect their host galaxies, especially when in a particularly energetic regime, deemed Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN). These objects have been observed in the early Universe, and it is therefore essential to characterise such sources as we learn more about early Universe galaxy evolution. In this talk I present important examples of such characterisations, notably that of SMACS S06355, an obscured AGN candidate existing just 0.68 Gyrs after The Big Bang. I additionally present characterisations of other early Universe AGN candidates. This work combines data from the recent flagship mission JWST and the Spectral Energy Distribution (SED) fitting code BEAGLE-AGN, thereby using spectral signatures of galaxies to derive a variety of properties, including metallicity, luminosity and star formation rate. By doing so, we are able to develop our knowledge of early Universe galaxy evolution to extents previously unattained.
Shree Hari Mittal
Cosmology from Radio -Optical crossmatched catalog: Cross - correlation with Cosmic Microwave Background
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The second data release of LOFAR Two metre sky survey covers ~5.600 deg^2 and more than 4 million sources however, lacks redshift information of it’s radio sources. Using the optical counterparts to the radio sources with photometric redshifts, we analyse the harmonic space cross-correlation of galaxy over-density with CMB lensing map from Planck, as well as auto-correlation of such radio galaxies. We aim to better constrain the galaxy bias of radio galaxies to better understand non-linear regime of matter power spectrum.
Jessica Copeland
Probing the atmospheric structure and composition of the coolest brown dwarfs.
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With the discovery of brown dwarfs, substellar mass objects, the stellar MK spectral sequence was extended beyond the M class to include three additional classes: L, T and Y. Brown dwarfs in the cooler end of the T and Y classes lie in the temperature range of 600 to ~250 K. These lower temperatures, overlapping with exoplanetary temperatures and properties, give rise to diverse, complex atmospheric structures and chemical abundances not present in warmer brown dwarfs. The T-type, brown dwarf-mass object W0751 lies on an extremely wide orbit around its host M-type dwarf star. Observations by NIRSpec, onboard the James Webb Space Telescope, provided high resolution spectral data covering wavelengths 2.8 to 5.2 μm, which were analysed using Brewster (Burningham+2017), a Bayesian retrieval framework, and a new parameterisation of the atmospheric pressure-temperature profile that allows temperature inversions when deemed realistic. Unlike exoplanets, brown dwarfs are often isolated or at wider orbits around a host star, meaning less contamination from other objects in spectral observations. Furthermore, low temperature brown dwarfs are easier to detect when isolated in comparison to cool exoplanets. Therefore, for now, the atmospheres of cool brown dwarfs also act as the test ground for exoplanet atmospheres, providing crucial information about internal atmospheric processes at low temperatures.