Dr Gerard Watts
Telephone: +44 020 7848 1013
Email: gerard.watts@kcl.ac.uk
Office: S4.14, Strand Building, Strand Campus
Title: Reader in Theoretical Physics
Biography
Gerard Watts gained his PhD from Cambridge in 1990, under the supervision of Peter Goddard. He then had postdoctoral research positions in Durham, Montreal and Paris while also holding a research fellowship from St John's College Cambridge.
He was awarded an Advanced Research fellowship from the then EPSRC and moved to King's in 1996. Gerard was appointed lecturer in 2000 and reader in 2001.
Research Interests
Dr Watts is a member of the Theoretical Physics research group, and his interests lie in the general area of quantum field theory, and more specifically quantum field theory in two dimensions.
For the last few years he has spent some time working on different ways that boundaries are described in such field theories - in both conformally invariant and massive models - and in the relation between short distance (UV) and long distance (IR) descriptions - and also on the structure of the space of field theories and their boundary conditions.
He is also interested in applications of these field theory techniques to condensed matter models and to string theory, and in developing new algebraic and numerical techniques to study them.
So far Dr Watts has supervised four PhD students - Kevin Graham and Ingo Runkel who finished their PhD studies some time ago, Philip Giokas who graduated in 2012 and Nicholas Iles who is currently in the first year of his PhD. He would be interested in supervising students in any of the areas above, in particular in algebraic approaches to two-dimensional quantum field theory and in the study of boundary conditions in integrable and/or conformal field theory.
Selection of Publications
This is a list of selected recent papers. All papers available on the ArXiv archive can be found here.
- Excited state g-functions from the Truncated Conformal Space, with Gabor Takacs, arXiv:1112.2906, JHEP 1202 (2012) 082
- Moduli space coordinates and excited state g-function, arXiv:1107.0236, JHEP 1202 (2012) 059
- On the renormalisation group for the boundary Truncated Conformal Space Approach, arXiv:1104.0225, Nucl.Phys. B859 (2012) 177-206
- Defect flows in minimal model, with Márton Kormos and Ingo Runkel, arXiv:0907.1497, JHEP 11 (2009) 057