Photo of me

Alexander Farren

About me

2020-2024: Theoretical Physics at Trinity College, Dublin.
2024-2025: Part III at St. John's College, Cambridge.

I wrote this website to showcase some extracurricular work 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 at St. John's College, Cambridge.

I wrote this website to showcase some extracurricular work 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 Pre-print (nucl-th/2412.10693)

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 Cloud Chamber
– Nov 2024

A cloud chamber reveals charged particles which are usually invisible to the naked eye. These basic experiments played a historical role in our understanding of particle physics, and can be made at home with a bit of effort! I created this interactive webpage as a convenient version of the real thing, where you can choose which particle to observe.
Interactive chamber

Interactive Potts Model
– Oct 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

Communication

Part III Seminar
– Dec 2024

I enjoyed learning about the on-shell bootstrap techniques for tree-level amplitudes from Cliff Cheung's TASI lectures, so I decided to prepare a student seminar for my master's cohort on the Parke-Taylor formula and loop amplitudes.
Slides

TPSA lectures
– 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

MathDeriver
– Oct 2024

As part of the 1-day Flywheel: Tools for Science hackathon event, I collaborated with Joe George and Piotr Toka to create a python script capabale of providing users with the derivation of numbered equations from arXiv articles.
Github

Rocket Launch
– Jan 2024

Built a simple model rocket, Puffin 1, with the Rocketry Comittee of the Trinity Space Society. Some wind led to the launch going sideways... Pictured are myself, Nathan Besch, Grace Madison and Oskar García García de las Heras.
Trinity News article Video of launch