Physics

The emergence of synchronization and its general features are of particular interest to scientists working on several areas, such as physics, social sciences and biology. From neurons to population dynamics and fireflies, nature showcases several examples of synchronized and collective behavior. The paradigmatic model to investigate synchronization was proposed by Y. Kuramoto in 1975, with several extensions and generalizations being studied in the years that followed. This colloquium aims at overviewing some interesting modifications of this model such as frustration, external forces and higher order interactions, in addition to discussing some fundamental aspects of synchronization phenomena. Finally, I will comment on some contributions from our research group and some prospects on this subject

During the last 20 years, we have seen a tremendous development in the computational power of our devices. We have by now laptops and phones that are more powerful than the high-profile workstations of a few generations ago. This computational power has already severely impacted our lives and many scientific fields as well, with examples ranging from AI to biophysics. On the other hand, a large class of problems in the study of quantum many-body systems has benefited only marginally from these developments.In the talk, I will review this class of problems, emphasizing the conceptual reason behind the limited impact that traditional computational methods have brought. I will then move on to describe the most promising candidates (in my opinion) to overcome the current situation.

Predicting the outcome of scattering processes of elementary particles in colliders is the central achievement of relativistic quantum field theory applied to the fundamental (non-gravitational) interactions of nature. While the gravitational interactions are too minuscule to be observed in the microcosm, they dominate the interactions at large scales. As such the inspiral and merger of black holes and neutron stars in our universe are now routinely observed by gravitational wave detectors. The need for high precision theory predictions of the emitted gravitational waveforms has opened a new window for the application of perturbative quantum field theory techniques to the domain of gravity. In this talk I will show how observables in the classical scattering of black holes and neutron stars can be efficiently computed in a perturbative expansion using a world-line quantum field theory; thereby combining state-of-the-art Feynman integration technology with perturbative quantum gravity. Here, the black holes or neutron stars are modelled as point particles in an effective field theory sense. Fascinatingly, the intrinsic spin of the black holes may be captured by a supersymmetric extension of the world-line theory, enabling the computation of the far field wave-form including  spin and tidal effects to highest precision. I will review our most recent results at the fifth order in the post-Minkowskian expansion amounting to the computations of hundreds of thousands of four loop Feynman integrals.

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