Quantum Mathematics Seminar: Cameron Bunney and Alexander Nagen (Nottingham)

Speaker: Cameron Bunney (University of Nottingham)

Title: Thermal and Bounded Unruh-DeWitt Detectors in Circular Motion

Abstract: Since the discovery by Unruh in 1976 that a uniformly linearly accelerated observer will observe a thermal bath when an inertial would observe none, much progress has been made into understanding this effect. Recently, Biermann et al. (2020) have investigated the circular acceleration version of the Unruh effect by analysing the excitations and de-excitations of a two-level detector in several limiting regimes. In this talk, I will extend the analysis to regimes accessible in analogue spacetime laboratory experiments. In particular, I will consider a non-zero background temperature and a field confined in a cavity.

Speaker: Alexander Nagen (University of Nottingham)

Title: Problems in induced gravity and non-commutative geometry

Abstract: The concept of induced gravity, which is that the dynamics of spacetime are induced by matter fields, has been developed several times in around the last two decades.  One of these developments is the induced Standard Model, which proposes that the fermions of the Standard Model induce the dynamics of both the Standard Model bosons and spacetime.  This talk is about the induced contributions that the right-handed neutrinos make to spacetime dynamics.  Some background topics will be reviewed.  Then, there will be a discussion of the right-handed neutrino - induced contributions.  This involves several mathematical and physical concepts, including non-commutative geometry.  Finally, there will be an outline of physical problems in non-commutative geometry for further work.