Photo of me

Alexander Farren

About me

I just graduated from Theoretical Physics at Trinity College, Dublin.
In October I will be starting Part III in St. John's College, Cambridge.

This is a website I wrote where you can find some extracurricular work I've done as well as my bachelor thesis.

Alexander Farren

farrenal@tcd.ie

Photo of me

About me

I just graduated from Theoretical Physics at Trinity College, Dublin.
In October I will be starting Part III in St. John's College, Cambridge.

This is a website I wrote where you can find some extracurricular work I've done as well as my bachelor thesis.

Research

Research Experience
- Summer 2024

Participated in the Hamilton Trust Summer Internship with Eliza Somerville and Mikey Whelan. Supervised by Prof. Ruth Britto, we studied the symbol alphabet of one-loop Feynman integrals.
Report Slides Poster

Research Experience
- Summer 2023

Received the Naughton Fellowship to do an REU at the University of Notre Dame. Worked with Prof. Ragnar Stroberg on spurious isospin symmetry breaking in the IMSRG formalism of ab initio many-body nuclear theory.
Report Slides

Bachelor Thesis
- 2023/2024

My thesis was a review of Foundations of the \(\small\text{AdS}_5\times S^5\) Superstring in which I reproduced many of the results from the first two chapters. It involved learning about basic string theory, superalgebras, the Green-Schwarz superstring in \(\small\text{AdS}_5\times S^5\), and how one could go about quantising it in the light-cone gauge. It turns out to be difficult to quantise the model directly so one resorts to a perturbative approach in the limit as the string length goes to infinity. My supervisor was Prof. Sergey Frolov.
Thesis Slides Poster

Visualisations

Interactive Potts Model
- 2023

Following an independent reading project on statistical field theory, my interest in critical behaviour led to this visual showcase of the square lattice Potts model. To play around with the lattice, see the interactive gallery (best on desktop). If you want to skip straight to the theory behind it, see the explanation.
Explanation Interactive gallery

Solitons in 1 dimension
- Nov 2023

Learned about basic soliton theory with Eliza Somerville and wrote a short introduction to solitons in 1+1 dimensions, namely solutions to the KdV equation and kink solitons for a \(\small\phi^4\) potential and a sine-Gordon potential.
Explanation Satisfying animations

Coming soon...
- ??? 2024

Communication

Physics Communication
- 2023

Wrote and filmed a video series introducing index notation, the Levi-Civita symbol and Einstein summation convention for the Theoretical Physics Student Association (TPSA).
ESC #1 ESC #2
ESC #3 - Classical Field Theory
ESC #3


Made a video on the critical temperature of the Ising Model with Mikey Whelan.
Critical Temperature of the 2D Ising Model
Ising model

Miscellaneous

Electoral Redistricting
- May 2023

Sparked by the Real World Mathematical Modelling hackathon event, applied multi-objective optimisation and data science techniques to the electoral redistricting of Ireland. I worked with Eliza Somerville, Ben McGloin and Mikey Whelan.
Report Github