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  • 07/01/2021

    Tini Veltman, a friend of the DFT and IFT

    Tini Veltman, a friend of the DFT and IFT

    By comunicacion / Enero 7, 2021

    With great sadness we learned of the death on the 4th of January 2021of Martinus Justinus Godefriedus Veltman, known to many as Tini Veltman.

    Tini was a great theoretical physicist, whose work played an essential role in the establishment of the Standard Model as the main pillar inour understanding of elementary particles and their interactions. Thisis well known, and for this work he was awarded the 1999 Nobel prizein Physics together with his former student Gerardus 't Hooft. What is not so well known is the strong ties that Prof. Veltman had with Universidad Autonoma de Madrid during several years of his life. Many of us had the pleasure of discussing, talking and dining with him during his yearly visits to the Department of Theoretical Physics at our University. This was possible since Francisco José Ynduraín, Paco, the founder of the Department, convinced Tini that a recurrent stay in Madrid could be fruitful both from the scientific and human aspects. At that time Prof. Veltman held the prestigious MacArthur chair at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. This materialized in 1988 by sharing hisAmerican chair with a part-time position ofextraordinary professor of the so-called  Propio program of the Spanish Ministry of Education. In this way, Veltman used to come to our Department for around a couple of months per year and participated in doctoral courses, and workshops held or organized by our department. He also wrote several papers in collaboration with Paco Ynduraín, with whom he had developed a solid friendship. I had been a front line witness of this process since Tini's first visit, and had the chance to talk with him about all kinds of things, scientific or not, in front of a blackboard or a glass of wine. Tini had an extraordinary and very strong character. He spoke his mind with honesty and had little appreciation of conventionalism or diplomacy. This made him an uncomfortable presence in some committees and panels. He also had a nice but sometimes harsh sense of humour. I remember his funny descriptions of the human landscape to be found in the neighbourhood of the Residencia de Estudiantes, where he used to stay and which he loved. In his visits to Spain he always brought with him his computer which had a transparent cover where the chips and components could be seen through, to avoid problems at the airport. His computer had ROM chips with hisprogram Schoonship burnt in. This had been the result of one of his visionary ideas: the necessity of using computers to do complicated analytical calculations. Schoonschip was the first of its kind, much before others like Mathematica, Maple, Matlab, Reduce, Maxima, etc had been thought of. Complying with his character, scientifically Prof. Veltman had very strong views, some of which were unconventional. Indeed, this was the case when he was convinced of the necessity of describing particle interactions by quantum field theory. For years he pursued this roadway involving his students in it. That was the case of Gerardus 't Hooft with whom he developed the crucial steps to make the just born electroweak quantum theory mathematically  consistent. His strong views extended to some other aspects like perturbation theory, the Higgs boson or the cosmological constant. Some of his papers on these subjects were seminal.

    Unfortunately, his professorship at UAM ended in 1996 when he became 65, three years short of the time when he was awarded the Nobel prize. Still he continued visiting us and participating in events like Paco's 60th anniversary workshop, his own Nobel price celebration at ourpremises, the  Paco Yndurain Colloquium series or the Inaugurationworkshop of the IFT building. Tini was always very positive about our Institute and used his prestige to support us when requested. In summary, he loved coming to Spain and enjoyed both the scientific and human exchanges with us. With his death we have lost a friend as well as a unique and irreplaceable figure.

    Antonio Gonzalez Arroyo

    IFT member and Catedrático de Física Teórica at DFT

  • 27/04/2020

    Dr. Miguel A. Sánchez-Conde has been recently appointed convener of the Dark Matter and New Physics working group of the Fermi-LAT collaboration

    Dr. Miguel A. Sánchez-Conde, an ‘Atracción de Talento’ senior researcher at the Institute for Theoretical Physics (IFT) and UAM Department of Theoretical Physics, has been recently appointed convener of the Dark Matter and New Physics working group of the Fermi-LAT collaboration. This is the second time that Dr Sánchez-Conde will act as such, after a 2-years period back in 2014-15. 

  • 27/04/2020

    DFT professor M. Belen Gavela has been appointed member of the Belle Program Advisory Committee (BPAC).

    The committee provides advice and recommendations on scientific, technical and planning issues related to the B-Factory Project: the Belle experiment, SuperKEKB, and with the main focus on the progress of the Belle II experiment.
     

  • grupo de gente 21/10/2019

    Descubren rotaciones cuánticas inesperadas en los isótopos de cadmio

    Los sistemas estables de isótopos de cadmio son considerados el paradigma de núcleos atómicos que vibran alrededor de una forma esférica. Un reciente trabajo, en el que participa la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM), demuestra que estos sistemas cuánticos tienen una estructura mucho más compleja de la que creíamos, en la que coexisten diferentes formas girando en lugar de vibrar. Los resultados se publican en Physical Review Letters.

  • 23/10/2018

    The Department of Theoretical Physics and the Institute of Theoretical Physics participate in a new H2020 project

    A new Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network (MSCA-ITN) funded by the European Union H2020 programme named "European network for Particle physics, Lattice field theory and Extreme computing" (EuroPLEx) has recently been approved (Grant Agreement: 813942; duration: Jan. 2019 - Dec. 2022).

  • 06/06/2018

    Reunión proyecto Estallidos

    Durante tres días, del 6 al 8 de junio, los componentes del proyecto coordinado ESTALLIDOS, procedentes del CIEMAT, el Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, el Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias y la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, que actúa como nodo coordinador, se reunieron en el CIEMAT para hablar de sus actividades recientes y también de cómo abordar los retos que se presentan en el futuro cercano.

  • III Jornadas de  Astronomía 20/04/2018

    III Jornadas de Astronomía

    Durante los pasados 20 y 27 de abril se ha celebrado en nuestro campus la tercera edición de las Jornadas de Astronomía en la UAM, una actividad de carácter anual organizada por el Observatorio Astronómico de la UAM y la Agrupación Astronómica Antares, en colaboración con la Asociación Nacional de Estudiantes Universitarios de Ciencias Físicas NUSGREM.

  • The CMS best fit value of the ttH signal strength modifier 04/06/2018

    The Higgs boson reveals its affinity for the top quark at ATLAS and CMS

    New results from the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the LHC reveal how strongly the Higgs boson interacts with the heaviest known elementary particle, the top quark, corroborating our understanding of the Higgs and setting constraints on new physics.

  • Foto del cartel anunciador 07/03/2018

    6ª reunión general de la proto-Colaboración Hyper-Kamiokande [en la UAM]

    Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 13-16 de marzo de 2018

     

    Hyper-Kamiokande es un proyecto científico promovido por relevantes Institutos japoneses, con el liderazgo de ICRR U. Tokio y KEK, y en el que participan también institutos científicos de todo el mundo (ver http://www.hyper-k.org). 

    La reunión contará con unos 100 participantes con figuras muy destacadas en el ámbito de la investigación de neutrinos y sus respectivos equipos de investigación. 

    Estas reuniones suelen tener lugar en el campus de Kashiwa de la Universidad de Tokyo siendo esta una de las pocas ocasiones en las que se hace fuera de Japón; esto es fruto de las excelentes relaciones entre científicos japoneses y españoles  en éste campo de la Ciencia.

  • Foto del catedrático José Luis Egido 02/03/2018

    El Prof. J. L. Egido es elegido como "Outstanding Referee" por la Sociedad Americana de Física

    La Sociedad Americana de Física (APS) ha elegido a 147 "Outstanding Referees" para 2018 que han demostrado un trabajo excepcional en la evaluación de los manuscritos publicados en el conjunto de revistas "Physical Review". La lista completa de premiados se encuentra en http://journals.aps.org/OutstandingReferees.

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