Friday 11 April 2025, 16:00 (Physics A1/3): Max Knobbe

Fast, Portable, and Stable Event Generation with PEPPER

I introduce PEPPER, an innovative portable parton-level event generator designed to operate across various modern CPU and GPU architectures in the modern high-performance computing (HPC) environment. PEPPER significantly speeds up tree-level calculations with high jet multiplicities, increasing throughput by 1-2 orders of magnitude. I will also cover key ongoing developments ranging from machine learning for phase-space generation to physics-driven enhancements to improve numerical stability in the infrared limits.

Friday 04 April 2025, 15:00 (Bentham House, Room 124 (Gideon Schreier LT): Multiple Speakers

IoP Practice Talks

Friday 21 March 2025, 15:00 (Anatomy LT G04)

Sinead Farrington

Director of Particle Physics, STFC : Visit and Q&A

Prof. Sinead Farrington, the Director of Particle Physics at STFC, will visit UCL to hear about the UCL High Energy Physics group and some of our existing collaborations with national labs. Prof. Farrington will then discuss the strategy for the Particle Physics Division, give an update on the European Strategy for Particle Physics Update process, and finally take questions. Everyone in the group is invited to attend.

Friday 28 February 2025, 16:00 (North-West Wing Lecture Theatre G22)

Alessio Spurio Mancini (Royal Holloway)

Cosmology with Euclid: an Overview

The Euclid mission, launched in July 2023 by the European Space Agency, is set to revolutionise our understanding of the Universe by probing the nature of dark energy, dark matter, and fundamental physics with unprecedented precision. By surveying approximately one third of the sky, Euclid will create a 3D map of the Universe observing around 1.5 billion galaxies across 10 billion years of cosmic history. In this talk, I will provide an overview of Euclid’s scientific goals and its unique observational strategy. I will focus on the “3x2pt analysis”—combining weak lensing and galaxy clustering measurements—as a powerful tool to constrain modifications to General Relativity, neutrino masses, and the nature of dark energy. Additionally, I will discuss the computational challenges posed by Euclid’s unprecedented dataset, and highlight the role of advanced statistical methods and machine learning in tackling them.

Tuesday 18 February 2025, 16:00 (B05 LT Chadwick Building)

Michael Ramsey-Musolf

SPECIAL SEMINAR:: Was There an Electroweak Phase Transition?

The possible existence of beyond Standard Model physics at the TeV scale or below has important implications for the thermal history of electroweak symmetry-breaking. A first order phase transition -- not possible in the minimal Standard Model with a 125 GeV Higgs boson -- would provide the preconditions for generating the cosmic matter-antimatter asymmetry through electroweak baryogenesis and provide a source of primordial gravitational radiation. I discuss recent theoretical developments in assessing this possibility and the implications for high energy collider phenomenology and next generation gravitational wave searches.

Friday 24 January 2025, 16:00 (LG11 Lecture Room, Bentham House)

Ivan Martinez-Soler

Status and Prospects of the Three-Neutrino Mixing Scenario

Over the past decade, significant experimental efforts have been dedicated to measuring the parameters governing neutrino evolution. These efforts span a diverse range of sources, including solar, atmospheric, accelerator, and reactor neutrinos. The integration of these results into global analyses has been pivotal in examining the consistency among datasets and providing a comprehensive description of neutrino evolution. In this talk, I will present the latest findings from our global analysis, highlighting the major uncertainties and tensions observed across various datasets. Additionally, I will explore the potential of a combined analysis of atmospheric neutrino experiments, encompassing Super-Kamiokande, Hyper-Kamiokande, IceCube-Upgrade, and ORCA. By addressing shared systematic uncertainties—such as those arising from flux and neutrino-water interactions—alongside the unique uncertainties of each experiment, our study predicts transformative advances by 2030. These include determining the octant of θ23 with 99% confidence, establishing the neutrino mass ordering with a significance greater than 5σ, and providing critical insights into the CP-violating phase (δCP) in the leptonic sector.