Issue 1, 2014
Tomi Koivisto
Nordita Assistant Professor in Theoretical Astro-Particle Physics or Cosmology
Tomi took up his Assistant Professorship at Nordita in October 2013. His field of research is gravitation and cosmology, with main emphasis on quantum and classical extensions of the theory of general relativity and their cosmological and astrophysical implications.
He has worked extensively on dark energy, early universe inflation and alternative cosmologies. His contributions have established new connections between large scale structure observations and fundamental physical theories, and he is a member of the Euclid consortium theory group.
In the field of gravity theories, his main foci are the gravitational aspects of higher dimensional theories such as D-brane scenarios in type II string theory, and nonlocal approaches to the problems of renormalisability and the cosmological constant.
David Abergel
Assistant Professor in Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics
David's research is centered on the theory of electronic properties of two-dimensional materials. Most of David's past work has been on graphene - an atomically thin layer of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb lattice - but he has also worked on 3D topological insulators and other monolayer systems. These materials all exhibit a Dirac-like dispersion relation for the quasiparticles near the Fermi surface and a chirality which locks the momentum to a spin (or pseudospin) degree of freedom. This leads to a rich landscape of exciting fundamental physics, but also to many potential applications.
Recently, David was involved in an effort to describe the impact of realistic disorder on the functionality of proposed graphene devices, and especially the role of charged impurities (which are an inescapable byproduct of the fabrication processes) on experimentally measurable quantities such as transport characteristics and the electronic compressibility.
In the future David plans to continue working on Dirac materials, and particularly on trying to propose new and exciting applications for these materials through functionalizing them with dopants, by changing their geometry, and by combining these two-dimensional "building blocks" to create layered structures.
Nordita Fellow Jonathan Edge
Condensed Matter Physics
In the past Jonathan has worked on ultracold Fermi gases, in particular on how collective modes can be used to probe the properties of these systems. He has also worked on transport in quantum systems, mostly studying localisation properties at transitions between different topological phases. This has led, amongst other things, to studies on the plateau transition in the integer quantum Hall effect using what is known as the quantum kicked rotator. He is continuing this line of research and now also investigating problems in superconductivity.
Nordita Fellow Sven Bjarke Guðnason
Subatomic Physics
Bjarke received his PhD in theoretical physics at the University of Pisa in 2010. He is interested in field theories and especially gauge theories, their behavior at strong coupling and confinement. In the course of understanding the real physical problems, as many theoreticians his interest was caught by toy problems and tools along the way, such as (extended) supersymmetry, topological solitons, lower-dimensional theories, AdS/CFT, and non-perturbative methods, etc.
Nordita Fellow Bidya Binay Karak
Astrophysics
Bidya did his PhD at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore under the supervision of Arnab Choudhuri. Bidya has been working on various aspects of the solar activity cycle including the origin of grand minima and solar cycle prediction. In the near future he plans to focus on three-dimensional simulations of turbulent dynamos.
Nordita Fellow Alexander Krikun
Subatomic Physics
The main subject of interest for Alexander is the application of the gauge/string duality (AdS/CFT) to various strongly coupled systems such as quantum chromodynamics (AdS/QCD) or high temperature superconductivity in condensed matter (AdS/CMT). The gauge/string duality is a modern approach to deal with strongly coupled theories and can provide new insight onto longstanding unsolved problems of physics.
Postdoctoral Fellow Nishant Singh
Astrohysics
Nishant did his PhD at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore under the supervision of Sridhar with whom he worked on the dynamo problem with non-helical turbulence in the presence of shear. He then moved to the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pune, India. He has already registered a Nordita preprint (2013-86) on the time variability of the viscosity parameter in differentially rotating discs.
PhD Student Xinyi Chen
Subatomic Physics
Xinyi graduated from the University of Barcelona and did her master in high-energy physics at ETH (Zurich) and École Polytechnique (Paris), where she worked on properties of arbitrary dimension conformal field theories for her master thesis. She joined Nordita in September 2013 to pursue her PhD studies under the supervision of Konstantin Zarembo. She will investigate the integrability of quantum field theories as well as the holographic principle.
PhD Student Raffaele Marino
Statistical Physics
Raffaele obtained his master degree in April 2013 from the University of Rome "La Sapienza", where he studied optimization problems (K-SAT), statistical mechanics, econophysics and stochastic methods. He started his PhD in October 2013 in the condensed matter and statistical physics group at Nordita, working under joint supervision of Ralf Eichhorn (Nordita) and Erik Aurell (KTH). He works on the project "Optimal processes in small systems under thermal noise".
Visiting PhD Student James Gordon
Subatomic Physics
James will be visiting Nordita for one year supported by the Marie Curie Initial Training Network GATIS. He is a PhD student at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
Visiting PhD Student Stojan Janović
Biophysics
In 2012 Stojan became a PhD student in the EuroSPIN joint European doctoral programme in computational neuroscience. Stojan's current research interests include the evolution of statistics of self-exciting point processes and the emergence of higher-order correlations through synaptic interactions in neural networks.
Visiting Postdoc Harsha Raichur
Astrophysics
Harsha comes to Nordita from the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pune, India, where she has worked on X-ray astronomy with a focus on stellar mass binaries. She will be visiting Nordita for three years and plans to interact also with scientists at the Astronomy Department at Stockholm University.
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