Joint Belgian hep-th seminars

A longstanding Belgian tradition has been the organisation of weekly seminars in high-energy theoretical physics that aim to bring together research groups from various institutes in the country. Originally held by ULB and VUB in Brussels together with KU Leuven, with Mons and Ghent joining, respectively, in 2009 and 2023, the current set of participating institutions is given by

The seminars take place on most Wednesdays of the academic year, with the location varying among the aforementioned institutions, while speakers are invited from both inland and abroad.

Schedule

10:30 – 11:30 first talk
11:30 – 12:00 coffee break
12:00 – 13:00 second talk
13:00 – 14:00 lunch

Upcoming seminars

Past seminars

Useful information for speakers

Each seminar lasts about one hour, which should approximately consist in 50 minutes of talk, followed by 10 minutes of questions and discussion. The audience comprises the participating institutions’ professors, postdocs and students, who work on a wide range of topics in high-energy theory, from (super)gravity and cosmology to string theory and higher spins. A pedagogical introduction is, therefore, very much encouraged.

 

8 November 2023

  • Blagoje Oblak (Université libre de Bruxelles) | Anisotropic Quantum Hall Droplets
  • Antoine Bourget (IPhT) | Why Symplectic Singularities?
  • Ana-Maria Raclariu (University of Amsterdam) | Entanglement, soft modes and celestial CFT

 

31 May 2023

  • Michele Schiavina (University of Pavia) | Hamiltonian gauge theory with corners. Soft symmetries, memory and superselection from Hamiltonian reduction by stages
  • Sašo Grozdanov (University of Edinburgh) | Spectra, reconstructions and pole-skipping

 

1 February 2023

Special event : BEL lectures by Axel Kleinschmidt (Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, Potsdam).

  • String scattering old and new I
  • String scattering old and new II

 

30 November 2022

  • Oliver Schlotterer (Uppsala University) | Modular graph forms and iterated integrals in string amplitudes
  • Manus Visser (University of Cambridge) | Thermodynamic ensembles for de Sitter space and other causal diamonds

 

26 October 2022

  • Ricardo Monteiro (Queen Mary University of London) | Celestial chiral algebras, colour-kinematics duality and integrability
  • Ashish Shukla (CPHT Palaiseau) | Bounds on gravitational brane couplings and tomography in AdS3 black hole geometries
  • Michele Schiavina (University of Pavia, Italy)
  • Piotr Tourkine (CNRS & LAPTh, Annecy, France)
  • Boris Pioline (CNRS & LPTHE, Sorbonne University, France)
  • Ivano Basile (ASC Munich, Germany)
  • Oliver Schlotterer (Uppsala University, Sweden)
  • Ioannis Tsiares (IPhT, France)
  • Renann Lipinski Jusinskas (ASCR Prague, Czech Republic)
  • Ricardo Monteiro (Queen Mary University of London, UK)

Speakers invited by UMONS in previous years are listed here.

 

Organisers on behalf of UMONS:

Arghya Chattopadhyay (firstname.lastname@umons.ac.be)
Victor Lekeu (firstname.lastname@umons.ac.be)