| Friday 25 July 2025 | |
| Events for day: Wednesday 16 July 2025 |
| 11:00 - 12:00 Wednesday Weekly Seminar - Hybrid Format Cosmic birefringence as a probe of the nature of dark matter School PARTICLES AND ACCELERATORS Abstract: Understanding the fundamental nature of dark matter remains one of the most profound challenges in modern physics. In this talk, I will present how cosmic birefringence—the rotation of the polarization plane of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) photons—can serve as a sensitive probe of dark matter phenomenology. I will focus on theoretical frameworks in which dark matter candidates, such as sterile neutrinos, dipolar dark matter, or axion-like fields, induce parity-violating effects that manifest as measurable birefringence. These signatures offer a unique observational window into the interactions between dark matte ... 14:00 - 15:00 QPM Weekly Seminar (Hybrid Format) Entanglement generation and scaling from noisy quenches across a quantum critical point School QUANTUM PHYSICS AND MATTER We study the impact of noise on the dynamics of entanglement in the transverse-field Ising chain, with the field quenched linearly across one or both of the quantum critical points of the model. Taking concurrence as a measure of entanglement, we find that a quench generates entanglement between nearest- and next-nearest-neighbor spins, with noise reducing the amount of entanglement. Focusing on the next nearest-neighbor concurrence, known to exhibit Kibble-Zurek scaling with the square root of the quench rate in the noiseless case, we find a different result when noise is present: The concurrence now scales logarithmically with the quench ra ... |