### Browse By

The research portfolio of the School of Physics is divided into six broad areas — Astronomy, Particle Physics, Nuclear Physics, Condensed Matter Physics and Applied Physics, with a spectrum in each area from experiment to theory.

Our policy is to combine breadth with excellence and so create an exciting and dynamic environment in which research can flourish.

We are at the heart of a large number of collaborations with other research institutes in the UK and overseas, and with many industrial partners both large and small.

### Recent Submissions

• #### Dynamics of chiral particles in viscous fluids ﻿

(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-03-29)
Colloidal suspensions --- micron sized particles in a molecular solvent, typically water --- are found everywhere in nature, e.g. milk, and in artificial materials, e.g. paint. The dynamics of colloidal particles are ...
• #### Regulation of topological entanglement in ring polymers ﻿

(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-03-28)
Entanglement abundance and complexity can be both beneficial and detrimental to the biological and mechanical function of polymers. In living organisms, for instance, DNA entanglement is so impactful that its proliferation ...
• #### Collective motion in microswimmer suspensions ﻿

(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-03-15)
The main distinction of active matter from its passive counterpart is the ability to extract energy from the environment (consume food) and convert it into directed motion. One of the most striking consequences of this ...
• #### Stochastic effects in systems of aligning self-propelled particles ﻿

(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-03-07)
Systems of self-propelled particles are often capable of exhibiting complex behaviours on a macroscopic scale with only simple interactions between the active microscopic agents. In systems where the particles interact ...
• #### Isospin-breaking corrections to light pseudoscalar leptonic decays rates ﻿

(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-02-13)
The Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa (CKM) matrix is a 3x3 unitary matrix in the Standard Model of particle physics. It characterises the transmutation of quarks in flavor-changing weak decays. In flavor physics, a precise ...
• #### Gas in and around galaxies in the Simba simulations ﻿

(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-02-10)
Galaxy evolution is an interplay of physical processes across a wide range of cosmological size scales, from star formation and black hole growth on sub-pc scales, to interactions with their environments on Mpc scales. The ...
• #### Role of quantum coherence and dissipation in cosmology ﻿

(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-02-09)
This thesis looks at different manifestations that the non-unitary dynamics proper of dissipation can have during the inflationary era and the late-time universe. For starters, we formalise the calculation of the primordial ...
• #### Modelling bacterial biofilms in spatially heterogeneous environments ﻿

(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-02-08)
Biofi lms are communities of one or more species of microorganism which have adhered both together and to a surface. Biofi lms are ubiquitous in nature, with up to 80% of bacterial life on earth estimated to be found in ...
• #### Planet formation and the early evolution of self-gravitating protoplanetary discs ﻿

(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-01-20)
When a Giant Molecular Cloud (GMC) collapses to form a stellar core, conservation of angular momentum will lead to the formation of a protoplanetary disc, with an initial mass potentially of the order of its stellar host. ...
• #### Chaos, statistics and inverse cascades in turbulent flows ﻿

(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-01-18)
Describing turbulence has been one of the most important unsolved problems of physics for the last two centuries. Multiple attempts have been made and yet there is no successful theory of turbulence to date. The most ...
• #### X-ray thermal diffuse scattering at high pressure ﻿

(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-01-17)
In single-crystal diffraction images, thermal diffuse scattering (TDS) produces a highly structured background, which contains a wealth of information about the lattice dynamics of the system. Synchrotron facilities with ...
• #### Formation of globular clusters in a cosmological context ﻿

(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-01-12)
Globular Clusters (GCs) are among the oldest gravitationally bound stellar systems, as they are characterised by stellar populations with ages of 11.5 to 12.5 Gyr. They probably formed during, or just after, the epoch of ...
• #### Bayesian computation in astronomy: novel methods for parallel and gradient-free inference ﻿

(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-01-11)
The goal of this thesis is twofold; introduce the fundamentals of Bayesian inference and computation focusing on astronomical and cosmological applications, and present recent advances in probabilistic computational methods ...
• #### QCD scattering amplitudes in the high-energy limit ﻿

(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-01-11)
In perturbative quantum field theory, logarithmic divergences generically occur whenever there is a large disparity between physical scales. In this thesis we are interested in the so-called high-energy logarithms, L, ...
• #### Towards lattice simulations of scalar holographic cosmological models ﻿

(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-01-10)
Over the past decades, inflation has been the leading paradigm for describing the initial conditions of Big Bang cosmology. It provides an account of our spatially flat universe, and gives excellent agreement with the ...
• #### Measurement of $\Delta \Gamma_s$ using the $B^0_s$ decays to the final states $J/\psi \eta^{\prime}$ and $J/\psi f_0$} ﻿

(The University of Edinburgh, 2023-01-09)
The main research field of the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment at Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the study of CP violation and rare decays of beauty and charm hadrons. Measurement of the B⁰ₛ mixing parameters ...
• #### Tidal disruption events: what, where, when and why? ﻿

(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-12-08)
A tidal disruption event (TDE) occurs when a star crosses the tidal radius of a nearby supermassive black hole (SMBH) and is subsequently torn apart. The fall-back of the stellar debris onto the black hole produces a ...
• #### Studies of condensed matter excitations in bicollinear magnetic materials and disordered perovskites using inelastic neutron scattering techniques ﻿

(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-11-29)
Neutron scattering is an important research technique that has furnished a wealth of information about condensed matter systems ever since Ernest O. Wollan and Clifford G. Shull first demonstrated its ability to probe ...
• #### Giant exoplanets and brown dwarfs: exploring the atmospheric retrieval method via direct imaging spectroscopy ﻿

(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-11-29)
The retrieval method, also known as the inverse method, has become a fundamental analysis technique for modelling and understanding exoplanetary atmospheres. In their simplest form, retrieval approaches aim to obtain the ...
• #### Rheology of granular-colloidal gel composite suspensions ﻿

(The University of Edinburgh, 2022-11-28)
Granular-colloidal gel composite suspensions composed of a mixture of large repulsive particles (LRPs) and small attractive particles (SAPs) are encountered in a variety of industrial applications such as the manufacturing ...