TBD

Unity is one of the world’s leading platforms for creating interactive 3D environments, powering everything from games and mobile apps to scientific visualizations and immersive virtual reality experiences. While widely known in the entertainment industry, Unity has become an increasingly powerful tool in scientific research, communication, and education.

This course introduces Unity as a versatile platform for simulating and visualizing physical phenomena. Over the span of five hours, participants will learn to build interactive 3D scenes that bring physics to life, using Unity’s built-in physics engine and custom scripts to model dynamic systems.

Participants will:

• - Gain hands-on experience in Unity’s 3D environment and physics engine
• - Learn to simulate classical mechanics and physical interactions
• - Create visual representations of abstract or large-scale phenomena (e.g. motion, forces, collisions, or energy)
• - Develop skills to port simulations to desktop, mobile, or immersive platforms (VR/AR)

By this course, students are encouraged to push the boundaries of traditional science communication by designing novel ways to represent and explore the core ideas of fundamental physics. The tools and concepts learned here can serve as a launchpad for creative projects in astrophysics, cosmology, particle physics, nuclear physics and medical physics — making the most complex and abstract phenomena more accessible, intuitive, and interactive.

Expected schedule:

• - Morning: 10.00 - 12.30
• - Afternoon: 15.00 - 17.00

Registration form: https://forms.office.com/e/tFRKwFGjDK?origin=lprLink

This course is free of charge and open to the general public. It is also included in the Academic Training Programme for IGFAE staff (more info here).

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a crucial tool to analyse proton-proton collisions data collected by the CMS experiment at the LHC, pushing the frontier of simulation, trigger, reconstruction, and analysis methods. In this seminar I will outline, with examples from my own research inside and outside of CMS, the path that led to the first CMS applications of simple machine learning algorithms such as boosted decision trees to the modern frontier of differentiable programming: I will show how recent developments push the boundaries of information encoding to power up the design of the accelerators and detectors of the next 50+ years, towards the AI-assisted design of experiments whose scientific output is optimized while accounting for budgetary constraints and while proceeding towards the goal of net-zero emissions.

In this seminar, I will introduce birdtack methods which can be used in QCD to evaluate the color structures and color factors, associated with the gauge group SU(N). I will present recent results using those elementary tools, for the calculation of projection operators associated with the decomposition of the tensor product 27 x 27  and illustrate how they can be used to evaluate the soft anomalous dimension matrix for the corresponding two-to-two process.

In this talk, we will discuss formulation of lattice gauge theory in the language of quantum computing and preliminary results obtained by using tensor network methods.

The N=8 SO(8) gauged SUGRA in D=4 corresponds to the low-energy dynamics of M-theory when it is compactified on an S^7. A great effort has been put into the construction of solutions of consistent truncations of the maximal theory, such as the STU model. In this talk, I will review both supersymmetric and non-supersymmetric black hole solutions known in the literature, with particular emphasis on the static planar black hole configurations with four charges. For this family, I will present a new thermodynamic stability analysis, due to the fact that the equation of state can be found analytically.

As part of his visit to Santiago de Compostela within the Programa Conciencia, Kip S. Thorne (Nobel Prize in Physics 2017), will participate this Friday in a scientific meeting with the IGFAE staff.

In the last decades of the 20th century, Thorne was one of the promoters of the LIGO project, together with Barry C. Barish and Rainer Weiss, with whom he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2017. As part of this collaboration, two gigantic detectors were built in the USA, separated by more than 3,000km, with perpendicular arms several kilometres long. In 2015, LIGO made possible the first experimental detection of the gravitational waves that Einstein had theoretically predicted a hundred years earlier. 

After receiving accreditation as a María de Maeztu Unit of Excellence in 2017, the IGFAE scientific direction identified gravitational wave science as a research line with great potential for growth within the Institute, especially in relation to multi-messenger astronomy. In 2018, the IGFAE joined the LIGO collaboration.

At this meeting, IGFAE staff will share with Kip Thorne their main scientific milestones in this field, as well as discuss the past, present and future of gravitational wave science.

Agenda:

11.00 | Arrival at IGFAE & Welcome by Jorge Mira & Carlos A. Salgado

11.15 | Carlos A. Salgado: Introduction to IGFAE

11.25 | Enrique Zas: ’Multimessenger astronomy with Pierre Auger’

11.35 | Jose Edelstein: ’General relativity and causality’

11.45 | Thomas Dent: ’Introducing GW astronomy at IGFAE’

11.55 | Juan Calderón: ‘Current GW research topics at IGFAE’

12.10 | Kip S. Thorne, Thomas Dent, Juan Calderón: ’The Past, Present & Future of GW Detection’.

12.40 | Q&A time

We are happy to announce a new edition of the MSCA-PF call Masterclass at the IGFAE, to be held on 8 May, 10.00am.

The training will focus on the 2025 call, which will open on 8 May and close on 10 September.

This is the continuation of a collaboration between IGFAE and Trend 2000 that has been going on for several years. For the first time, it will be held in person at the IGFAE, which gives the training an extra value this time.

As is well known, the IGFAE has achieved in recent years a significant success rate in the MSCA-PF call, with five beneficiaries.

The training is open to both candidates and supervisors.

It is worth mentioning that the collaboration with Trend2000 also includes the review of proposals, with deadlines in July and September.

Agenda:

10:00 Welcome and Introduction

10:15 MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships in context - Overview of rationale

10:45 Planning your Proposal Submission

11:00 The Proposal and its Requirements | Proposal Evaluation and What Evaluators Look For

11:15 You as principal investigator | Collaborating with your supervisor for proposal preparation

11:30 Key Tips for Excellence

12:15 Coffee

12:30 Key Tips for Impact

13:15 Key Tips for Implementation

13:45 Q&A

14:00 Short discussion with former & current MSCA-PF fellows at IGFAE

14:20 Lunch

15:00 Close of day

The relativistic viscous hydrodynamic description of the quark-gluon plasma by Müller-Israel-Stewart formulations has been very successful, but despite this success, these theories present limitations regarding well-posedness and causality. In recent years, a well-behaved version of the relativistic Navier-Stokes equations has been formulated, appearing as a promising alternative in which those limitations are absent. Using this novel theory, we perform numerical simulations of a quark-gluon plasma fluid that we use to describe experimental data on the transverse momentum distribution of hadrons from central Pb–Pb collisions measured at the LHC.