Leverhulme Peierls Fellows
Please join us to hear talks from a selection of the Leverhulme Peierls Fellows who joined Oxford Theoretical Physics in 2024.
Speakers
Nonlinear dynamics of active particles
Dr Rahil Valani
Active particles are non-equilibrium entities that consume energy from their environment and convert it into directed motion. They can be living organisms such as cells, bacteria, animals and birds, or inanimate entities such as colloidal particles or robots. A large collection of active particles, known as active matter, exhibits emergent collective phenomena such as bird flocks, mammalian herds, bacterial colonies and swarming robots. In this talk, I will provide an introduction to active particles and active matter -- a rapidly growing field of physics, focusing on the nonlinear dynamical behaviors of such particles. We will explore in particular the active system of superwalking droplets that can exhibit hydrodynamic quantum analogs.
There will be an experimental demo of superwalking droplets following the talk.
The physics of “flat” electrons
Dr Dumitru Călugăru
Landau’s Fermi liquid theory, a cornerstone of condensed matter physics, explains why electrons in most metallic crystalline solids behave as free fermions with renormalized parameters at low enough temperatures. However, the most exotic phases of quantum matter emerge when this framework breaks down—typically when electron-electron interactions become strong enough to surpass the perturbative regime. Such interactions are naturally enhanced in flat band materials, where suppressed kinetic energy allows electron-electron repulsion to dominate.
In this talk, I will explore the main strategies for engineering flat band materials, with an emphasis on conventional crystalline systems while briefly touching on engineered heterostructures. I will also introduce key concepts from band topology in an intuitive manner and discuss their relevance to flat band physics. Finally, I will highlight the role of strong interactions in these materials and survey recent experimental realizations.
How to program a quantum computer
Dr Dominik Hahn
Quantum computers have the potential to solve certain problems much faster than classical computers, including simulating quantum systems and optimizing complex processes. In this talk, I will explain how a quantum computer is built, using superconducting quantum processors as an example. I will discuss how quantum operations are programmed in a way similar to classical computing, and how these instructions are executed on real hardware. Finally, I will showcase practical examples of quantum programs running on superconducting devices, illustrating how theory translates into real-world computation.
