# Writing

Here is a list of all the papers, essays and notes I’ve written.

### Semester 1 2017

• Notes on Quantum Field Theory. I have written course notes for an introductory quantum field theory course, aimed at third year undergraduate course at the Australian National University. The aim is to create a course which provides a solid conceptual and computation foundation for undergraduate students, whilst developing the basics of topics in both particle physics and condensed matter theory. The notes cover canonical quantization, path-integrals, Feynman diagrams, fermions, tree-level QED and the basics of spontaneous symmetry breaking.

### Honours - 2016

• Honours Thesis. My honours project studied the emergence of nuclear interaction from higher energy physics. In particular, I was aiming to relate the phenomenological energy density functionals used in nuclear many-body simulations to underlying mesonic physics. My supervisor was Cedric Simenel, a nuclear theorist specializing in nuclear dynamics.

• I gave two presentations on my honours thesis. The mid-year was delivered after I had completed my preliminary research, and the final was given after my thesis had been written.

• Non-Anomalous Semigroups and Real Numbers. A paper presenting a novel definition of the real numbers, which I wrote as part of a course on category theory. The paper can be found on the arxiv at https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.05997.

• Dark Matter and the Diphoton Excess. Some notes I wrote in January on the 750 GeV diphoton resonance, while I was at Melbourne University. The diphoton resonance now appears to have been a statistical fluctuation, so my notes are no longer useful for anything.

### 2015

• The Quantum Zeno Effect. In this essay I show that the quantum Zeno effect is non-physical in the sense that any system which can perform the necessary arbitrarily quick measurements requires infinite energy. I wrote this as part of a measurement theory course run by Matt James, which heavily influenced my thinking on the measurement problem.

• I did a reading course on general relativity with Susan Scott. My final report was a collation of various tasks I completed through the semester. The most interesting parts are a discussion of the energy conditions in FRW cosmology, and a book review of Quantum Field Theory: The Why, What and How by Thanu Padmanabhan. My final presentation was on the singularity theorems.

• I also did a reading course on quantum field theory with Vladimir Bazhanov. My final report was on higher order corrections to the WKB method, as was my final presentation.

• My PHYS 3033 lab report, which was on neutron activation analysis. This mainly serves as proof (to myself mostly) that I can do labs, and I had a lot of fun automating peak detection and statistical analysis. The most fun part about this was the background peak identification, as I managed to detect both the $$^{238}$$U and $$^{232}$$Th sequences, along with a few other harder to identify peaks.

• Here are my (terse) notes for Algebraic Topology and for Algebra 3 (on Lie algebras and representation theory).

## High School (2002-2013)

In years 11 and 12 I studied for the International Baccalaureate, which requires students to write an extended essay on a topic of their choosing. Against pretty much all advice I read I decided to do one in maths. Since I struggled to find good maths extended essays, I have uploaded mine here in the hope it will prove useful to future students (and also to prove you don’t have to do cryptography as your topic if you do a maths extended essay).