Prof Michael Birse - postgraduate opportunities

I have supervised 9 PhD students and 3 MSc's. Recent graduates include:

Tom Barford, PhD (2004), " The renormalisation
group and applications in few-body systems"

Nick Petropoulos, PhD (2000), " Linear sigma model
and chiral symmetry at finite temperature"

Keith Richardson, PhD (1999), " Chiral symmetry
and the nucleon-nucleon interaction"

Possible future projects for students are:

"Effective Theories of Few-Nucleon Systems"

Developments at the borderline between particle and nuclear physics are leading to model-independent descriptions of the forces between nucleons. These make use of chiral perturbation theory to describe the long-range parts of the nuclear forces. Recent work at Manchester has used the renomalisation group to elucidate the importance of short-range terms in the nucleon-nucleon force and in the interaction among three nucleons. This project will extend the approach to include long-range interactions in three-body systems and will apply the results to the properties of 3H and 3He. In combination with the results of the preceeding project, this will allow extractions of neutron polarisabilities from Compton scattering experiments on 3He, as are planned at MAXLab and HIGS.

"Renormalisation Group for Nuclear Matter"

The renormalistion group (RG) equation for the Legendre effective ction has proved to very useful in particle and condensed-matter physics. This suppresses high-momentum modes by adding a scale-dependent regulator to the kinetic energy. As this scale is lowered the bare action, which can be expanded using point-like interactions, runs to the effective action with physical scattering amplitudes. We have recently applied this to pairing in nuclear matter. This project will extend that work to more realistic interactions, by including the effective range and three-body forces. The first step will be to solve the exact RG equation in vacuum to determine the couplings in the bare action. This is closely related to our work on the RG for nuclear forces in ChPT. It will provide the initial conditions on the evolution for a finite density of nucleons. The results will be used to study the properties of nuclear matter.