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The University of Edinburgh has a rich history of theoretical physics. In the nineteenth century, James Clerk Maxwell was a student here, and so was his friend Peter Guthrie Tait, the inventor of knot theory, who later on became professor of natural philosophy here. In 1922 the Tait Chair was established and Charles Galton Darwin, grandson of the great naturalist, was appointed as the first incumbent in 1923. He was succeeded by Max Born, one of the founders of quantum mechanics (Nobel Prize, 1954), who was Tait Professor from 1936 until 1953, followed by Nick Kemmer, inventor of isospin.
The discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN in 2012, almost half a century after Peter Higgs' prediction in 1964, was a milestone in the history of theoretical physics, for which Peter Higgs was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2013. Rarely in the history of physics has a theoretical prediction been confirmed so spectacularly, so long after it was originally made.
The Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics was established by the University of Edinburgh in August of 2012 to celebrate this achievement and to create new opportunities for researchers and students from around the world to come together to formulate new theoretical concepts, taking us beyond the limitations of current paradigms.
Starting during the summer of 2022, the Higgs Centre will celebrate its founding with in-person, online and offline activities, events and projects.
This event is a Outreach Event.
The Higgs Centre is celebrating 10 years since Peter Higgs was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics (in 2013), alongside François Englert, for the theory of how particles acquire mass.
Peter Higgs is an Edinburgh local and conducted his research at the University of Edinburgh.
Find out more about the ...
Alder Lecture Theatre, The Nucleus
This event is a Event.
The Higgs Centre is celebrating 10 years since Peter Higgs was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics (in 2013), alongside François Englert, for the theory of how particles acquire mass.
Peter Higgs is an Edinburgh local and conducted his research at the University of Edinburgh.
From 14:00, continuing the ...
Alder Lecture Theatre, The Nucleus
This event is a Outreach Event.
Our understanding of the structure of matter is that protons, neutrons, and nuclei emerge dynamically from the interactions of more fundamental particles described in the Standard Model of particle physics. In this lecture, I will give a broad introduction to the field and an overview of the numerical approach to ...
Alder Lecture Theatre, The Nucleus
This event is a Workshop.
Higgs-Maxwell workshops are a series of annual one-day meetings to discuss the current topics in theoretical and experimental particle physics and the prospects for future discoveries. The meeting is organised by the Universities of Durham, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Lancaster, and is held at the Royal Society of Edinburgh in Edinburgh ...
- Royal Society of Edinburgh, 22-26 George St, Edinburgh EH2 2PQ
This event is a Event.
Higgs-Maxwell workshops are a series of annual one-day meetings to discuss the current topics in theoretical and experimental particle physics and the prospects for future discoveries. The meeting is organised by the Universities of Durham, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Lancaster, and is held at the Royal Society of Edinburgh in Edinburgh ...
Royal Society of Edinburgh, 22-26 George St, Edinburgh EH2 2PQ
This event is a Workshop.
New Directions in Theoretical Physics is a series of international conferences organised by the Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics, aiming to highlight new opportunities and stimulate an exchange of ideas across all areas of contemporary theoretical physics. All talks are plenary reviews aimed at a broad audience of theoretical physicists ...
- 50 George Square, Edinburgh
This event is a Event.
In this public talk, geared towards a general audience, two recent Nobel Prize recipients, Peebles and Penrose, will offer autobiographical retrospectives on their journey towards solving some of the most profound questions in cosmology. Whereas Peebles adopted an empirical approach, learning about the universe by modelling the data, Penrose focused ...
50 George Square, Edinburgh
This event is a Event.
In 1964 a young physicist at the University of Edinburgh, Peter Higgs, posited the existence of an ephemeral fundamental particle – today known as the Higgs Boson - which is key to the existence of the material universe. For 50 years, teams of scientists sought to prove this theory, which was sensationally ...
50 George Square, Edinburgh
This event is a Event.
Joyce Garden graduated with a Bsc in Mathematical Physics at Edinburgh in 1996 and continued to complete a PhD in Lattice QCD on Light Hadron Spectroscopy with quenched and dynamical fermions in 2000. After 18 months as a software engineer in a small startup company contracted to Cisco, she joined ...
Higgs Centre Seminar Room, JCMB
This event is a Event.
Did you know that the 4th July is the 10th anniversary of the discovery of the Higgs boson?
Peter Higgs is an Edinburgh local and conducted his research at the University of Edinburgh. We are therefore putting on a very special 10th anniversary party. Come and celebrate with us, at ...
National Museum of Scotland, Chambers Street, Edinburgh
This event is a Event.
As part of the Higgs Centre’s Decennial celebrations, we are holding an alumni meeting on 25 June 2022.
We will also provide an online experience.
This event is part of the Higgs Centre Decennial so the agenda will focus on that, but we are happy to welcome graduates and ...
Playfair Library, University of Edinburgh
This event is a Event.
Nic’s connection to the Higgs Centre is through an MSc in Theoretical Physics that he completed in 2015, after which he continued to do a PhD with the Scottish Centre for Doctoral Training in Condensed Matter Physics. Under the supervision of Patrik Öhberg, and based at Heriot-Watt University, he ...
Higgs Centre Seminar Room, JCMB
This event is a Event.
Brian moved to Edinburgh from Ireland in 2016 for the MSc programme offered by the Higgs centre in Theoretical Physics.
Afterwards, he remained in Edinburgh (but moved to the Informatics forum) for a joint MRes/PhD programme in the CDT for Pervasive Parallelism, supervised by Prof. Elham Kashefi. Here, he ...
This event is a Event.
Chiara Decaroli is originally from a small village in Italy. She fell in love with quantum mechanics during her high school years after reading a book on quantum entanglement which she did not understand. Wanting to dig deeper, she came to the University of Edinburgh for her Bachelors in Physics ...
This event is a Event.
Ava Khamseh graduated with a PhD in Theoretical Particle Physics, under the supervision of Luigi Del Debbio at the Higgs Centre, in 2017 (after also having been an undergraduate degree in Physics at Edinburgh). After a year of postdoc in Prof Chris Ponting’s lab, she became a Cross-Disciplinary Fellow ...
This event is a Event.
Lettie Roach graduated from the Mathematical Physics MPhys programme at the University of Edinburgh in 2015 and went on to do a PhD at Victoria University of Wellington and a postdoc at the University of Washington in climate physics. She is currently an Associate Research Scientist at NASA GISS in ...
This event is a Event.
Gavin studied an MPhys Mathematical Physics at Edinburgh and continued to complete a PhD in Particle Theory under the supervision of Thomas Binoth and Gudrun Heinrich looking at (what was at the time) state of the art one-loop calculations. After a postdoc at DESY, Zeuthen, Gavin took up a position ...
This event is a Event.
Jack was a PhD student and worked at the Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics with Jenni Smillie, focussing on Z/gamma* emissions in the presence of multiple high energy QCD jets.
In 2016, he finished his PhD and went to work at Gambit Research working on building models to trade ...
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