Many of the lecture courses are followed up with one or two tutorials. Tutorial questions will be provided by the lecturers, and a crack team of experienced tutors will be on hand to help. Although the main focus of the tutorials will be on the material of the school, you are encouraged to ask your tutors questions about any aspect of physics, your PhD and the range of available leisure activities in Ambleside.
To help you get to know your tutors, they will also be contributing to the series of after-dinner seminars. .
This year, your tutors are - in alphabetical order - as follows.
Sam is a post-doc in the theoretical physics group in Birmingham University. His research focusses on strongly correlated electron systems, particularly in low-dimensions (for example, carbon nanotubes), looking particularly at quantum phase transitions between different ground states. He also has a strong interest in dimensional crossover phenomena, when many one-dimensional chains become weakly coupled, both in strongly anisotropic condensed matter systems, or cold atom traps.
Martin is a postdoc in the physics department at Leeds University, where he works on the theory of self-assembly in polymer systems. His PhD research was carried out at Imperial College London, and focused on critical phenomena in fluids at interfaces. After this, he worked as a postdoc at Edinburgh, where he studied the mode-coupling theory of the liquid-glass transition. His talk will give an overview of several models of the formation of glass from liquid.
Jim is lecturer at The Open University. He has a wide range of research interests, including the study of electron-phonon and polaron physics using Quantum Monte Carlo and diagrammatic techniques, electronic correlations in Hubbard models, statistical physics in medicine, social physics and information theory techniques applied to the interpretation of experiments.
Andrea is a postdoctoral fellow at the London Centre for Nanotechnology, University College London. She did her PhD in theoretical physics at the University of Oxford, where she studied critical phenomena far from equilibrium applying field theory techniques. Currently her research interests are in the field of biophysics, and her work is focussed on providing a theoretical understanding of biological systems at the scale of the cell. In particular, she is investigating how the external adhesive environment of cells controls the organization of the cytoskeleton. In a recent work she developed a theoretical model to predict the orientation of the cell division axis, which plays a crucial role, for instance, during development of multicellular organisms. In her talk she is going to speak about this exciting problem, which is an example of how a deeper understanding of biological systems can be achieved when physicists and biologists work together.
Gunnar is a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge. He is interested in phases of matter which arise from particles living within highly degenerate Hilbert-spaces in the presence of interactions. Phases of this kind may be found, for instance, in Fractional Quantum Hall systems, frustrated magnetic systems, and rotating gases of cold atoms. Recent interest in the Quantum Hall effect has been promoted by its ability to provide states with non-abelian excitations, which may serve as a basis of topological quantum computation. His talk will elucidate the use of variational wavefunctions for the understanding of the non-abelian fractional quantum Hall state at filling factor 5/2.
Denzil is an EPSRC Fellow in Theoretical Physics at Nottingham University. He is researching the physics of nano-electromechanical devices, (basically tiny tuning forks coupled to single-electron transistors or SETs), which as well as having applications in force-sensing and quantum-limited measurement, are of interest because their size lies somewhere between the atomic and macroscopic scales and therefore can be used to investigate the crossover between quantum and classical behaviour. In particular they are ideal systems in which to study the effect a measuring device can have on the measured object. His talk will focus on the example of a superconducting SET coupled to a nanomechanical resonator, and describe how the SET can significantly alter the behaviour of the resonator, including driving it into a non-classical state.
Click here to return to the main Physics by the Lake web page.