Alex Merle has been invited to participate in the SET FOR BRITAIN 2014 poster competition.
 

We wish Alex all the best!

We are delighted to announce that the group has been able to secure altogether 5 PhD Awards from the University and/or the Faculty for start in October 2014, in the form of 2 PGR Scholarship Fund Bursaries, 2 FPSE Scholarships and 1 Deans Scholarship. See here for additional information about such a funding.

This NExT PhD Workshop is the fourth of a series dedicated to post-graduate training. It is open to NExT Institute staff, PDRAs and PhDs as well as external participants. It aims to bring people together to present, share and generate new ideas. The topic of this edition is "The road ahead", a chance to discuss present status and future plans for particle physics in the light of LHC, Planck and neutrino results.

Please the indico page of the event for detailed information.

Ivo has won a Marie Curie Sklodowska Individual Fellowship which he will bring to Southampton. The project is named "Symmetry in Flavour Theory" and he will join SHEP from 01.09.2014 until 31.08.2016.

Southampton will host the 34th International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory in July 2016. The conference will be held on campus and we expect about 500 participants from across the globe (it moves in successive years between Europe, the Far East and the USA). The decision was made by the International Advisory Committee of the conference during this years Symposium "Lattice 2014" which was hosted by Columbia University, New York.

Lattice Field Theory is a subfield of particle physics in which space-time is approximated by a lattice of points and fundamental quantities are evaluated by simulations on high-performance supercomputers (our collaboration uses the DiRAC IBM BlueGene/Q machines in Edinburgh and accesses about 1.3 petaflop of processing power). The conference therefore brings together experts in particle physics and quantum field theory, in the development of the corresponding algorithms and even groups which build dedicated machines.

Here is a link to the conference website: Lattice 2016

2014 STAG public lecture by Physics Nobel Laureate Gerard 't Hooft

Follow the above link for detailed information and ticket reservation for Gerhard 't Hooft's talk on 1 October 2014 at 14:30 , Turner Sims.
link

Congratulations to Mr Declan Millar, a NExT PhD Student on a joint Southampton-QMUL PhD programme on the project `Search for Resonant Production of Top Pairs at ATLAS', supervised by Prof Stefano Moretti (Southampton HEP group) and Dr Lucio Cerrito (QMUL PPRC), who has secured a very prestigious ATLAS PhD Grant.

This grant will support Declan's stay at CERN on Long Term Attachment (LTA) to the ATLAS experiment for the academic year 2014/15, followed by additional support for a further year back in the UK. This award is also a clear endorsement by the experimental world of the importance of the NExT Institute vision of embedding theorists within data analysis.

Thanks to a grant from the STFC's Education, Training and Careers Committee, which secured co-funding alongside the traditional SEPnet contribution, the V NExT PhD Workshop, to be held in Cosener's House on 8-11 June 2015, will be open to PhD students from across the UK.

A novel proposal for cold dark matter, with a surpringly small mass of only 100 eV and interacting remarkably strongly with normal matter, has been published in Nature Scientific Reports   (authors James Bateman,  Ian McHardy, Alex Merle, Tim Morris and Hendrik Ulbricht). The paper also represents a milestone for the history of the department: for the first time there has been a publication involving authors from all three groups in Physics and Astronomy.

University press release

World wide press coverage

Title: Neutrino mass and mixing: from theory to experiment

Authors: Stephen F King, Alexander Merle, Stefano Morisi, Yusuke Shimizu and Morimitsu Tanimoto
 
"I am pleased to inform you that your paper has been selected to appear in the New Journal of Physics "Highlights of 2014" collection. This collection is a special showcase of articles that have been chosen to represent the breadth of interest and excellence of the work published in the journal last year.  Please find attached a certificate which we hope you will print out for the wall of your office/laboratory or post to your website."
 
http://iopscience.iop.org/1367-2630/page/highlights-of-2014