Title Promoter Affiliations Abstract "The interplay between Physics and Artificial Intelligence: an integrated perspective reconciling physical intuition and computational complexity" "Vincent Ginis" "Business technology and Operations" "We want to answer fundamental questions on the interface between Physics and Artificial Intelligence. Both fields share similar goals, for instance, finding structure in disordered data, but use different techniques to achieve these goals. In addition, the two research fields suffer from opposite shortcomings. For example, in Applied Physics, it is difficult to engineer optimal structures when there are too many degrees of freedom. In the field of Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning in particular, there is too little transparency into the machinery how certain results are obtained. Almost always, the physical intuition disappears in the end result. In this project, we want to combine the advantages of both fields, and solve important problems at their interface. On the one hand, we will develop a new kind of artificially intelligent algorithms that have internalized important physical concepts, and can therefore be used more efficiently in solving problems in Applied Physics. Such an artificial physicist could also be used to assist (neuro)-scientists and engineers in the development of theoretical models of physical and biological phenomena, and even to propose new experiments. On the other hand, we will use tools from Physics to gain a better understanding of the internal workings of artificial neural networks. A better physical understanding not only ensures more reliable proposed results, but will also lead to a more optimal training of the networks" "Physical causation versus causation in physics: physical setups and causal relations in practice." "Erik Weber" "Department of Philosophy and moral sciences" "In this project I will study physical causation by focusing on practical situations and applications rather than on physical laws. In order to formalise these applications, I define the concept ‘physical setup’. With this I analyse the meaning of causal claims, the type of evidence needed for these claims and the relationship these setups have with the laws of physics." "Chemical diagnostics of stellar physics: the physical and chemical properties of circumstellar environments around evolved stars as traced by molecules." "Leen Decin" Astronomy "The aim of the proposed research is ot study the late stages of evolution of stars with initial mass between 0.6 and 8 solar masses. The goal is to probe the physical and chemical properties of the mass-loss process dominating the late evolution of the majority of stars in galaxies as our Milky Way. That way we will enhance our knowledge on the total enrichment of the interstellar medium by evolved stars. The study encompasses the analysis of a comprehensive set of molecular line diagnostics using a state-of-the-art theoretical radiative transfer code. The analysis of a set of molecular line profiles based on an extensive grid of 1 dimensional (1D) theoretical models typically takes several CPU-years. Extension to a 2D or 3D geometry enhances the computation time with a factor ~3 to 20. In addition, the reduction of some new high-technological observational data can only be done on a 64GB ram computer. The requested funding will be used as financial supply to buy 4 DELL PowerEdge servers with 64 GB ram, each with 2 Quad Core porcessors. One server costs 9100 euro, taxes included. These processors will be implemented in the existing network at the Instituut voor Sterrenkunde from the K.U.Leuven." "Search for new physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics" "Dirk Ryckbosch, Didar Dobur" "Department of Physics and astronomy" "In this project we plan research with the CMS-detector at CERN, Geneva, the IceCube observatory at the South Pole, and the SoLid-detector in SCK.CEN, Mol. The recurring theme in every workpackage is the search for deviations from the Standard Model of particle physics, showing the way to new physics beyond this model." "INTENSE: particle physics experiments at the high intensity frontier, from new physics to spinoffs." "Didar Dobur, Dirk Ryckbosch, Michael Tytgat" "Department of Physics and astronomy, Centro de Investigaciones Energéticas, Medioambientales y Tecnológicas, TOKAI NATIONAL HIGHER EDUCATION AND RESEARCH SYSTEM, NATIONAL UNIVERSITY CORPORATION, National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology, B12 CONSULTING, Kansai University, Kyushu University, Fermi Research Alliance, Université Catholique de Louvain, University of Pisa, Tel Aviv University, SMART ENGINEERING & MANAGEMENT SOLUTIONS IKE, CLEVER OPERATION, University of Bern, University of Manchester, Yale School of Medicine, European Organization for Nuclear Research, University of Granada, Costruzioni Apparecchiature Elettroniche Nucleari (Italy), National Institute for Nuclear Physics, TECNO IN SPA, University of Liverpool, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Tokyo, Wigner Research Centre for Physics, University of Cambridge" "Neutrinos come in three types or flavours: electron, muon and tau. They are known to oscillate in and out of the three flavours as they travel in space, but only further evidence will help scientists determine whether they also oscillate into a fourth type – a sterile neutrino. The EU-funded INTENSE project constitutes a new European training network between universities, research centres and industries. The project's researchers will take leading roles in the Short-Baseline Neutrino programme at Fermilab, which focusses on the search for the sterile neutrino. They will participate in the commissioning of the three particle detectors comprising this programme (Icarus, MicroBooNE and the Short-Baseline Near Detector) and develop data acquisition and analysis techniques. Their endeavours will foster the development of cutting-edge technologies with spin-offs outside particle physics." "Statistical physics and theoretical physics of condensed matter" "Joseph Indekeu" "Theoretical Physics" "My research focuses on the theoretical description of phase transitions and critical phenomena using the methods of statistical mechanics. In particular I study cooperative phenomena at surfaces and interfaces, notably wetting phase transitions. The systems under investigation include molecular fluids and complex fluids (e.g. liquid crystals and colloid-polymer mixtures), ultracold gases and Bose-Einstein condensates, superfluids and superconductors. Furthermore, I study critical phenomena (e.g. percolation) on complex networks in the context of sociophysics problems." "The H boson gateway to physics beyond the Standard Model (be.h)." "Nick Van Remortel" "Particle Physics Group" "In 2012, a scalar particle has been discovered at the LHC (CERN). As of today, its properties match those of the Higgs boson of the Standard Model (SM), the current theory of fundamental interactions. This discovery has crowned 50 years of research, including seminal work done in Belgium by Brout and Englert. It has also opened a new era for particle physicists, with more-than-ever pressing mysteries to face, including the absence, despite predictions and indirect indications, of signs of new physics at the LHC. The overarching objective of this project, lead by a collaboration of theorists and experimentalists, is to use the Higgs as a probe of still largely unexplored territories beyond the SM. First, we aim at more precisely determining the Higgs boson couplings within the SM, including its self-coupling. We will either discover new interactions, or will constrain the range of possibilities. Concurrently, we will look for new scalar particles, possible siblings of the Higgs boson, a challenging and far-reaching task. Second, we will focus on a special feature of the Higgs boson, that of providing a gateway to a whole new world of hidden particles and interactions, an exploration which may shed light on the dark matter and neutrino mysteries. The proposal brings together the young generation of physicists that has contributed to the discovery of the Higgs and now leads a broad, ambitious and original research project on the high-energy physics frontier." "Tensor networks and the simulation of strongly-correlated quantum many-body physics" "Frank Verstraete" "Department of Physics and astronomy" "In recent years, more and more experiments were performed that bring quantum-mechanical effects to the macroscopic world. These experimental breakthroughs demand a theoretical understanding of how large quantum systems behave physically. The area of quantum many-body physics tries to provide such an understanding, but is faced with a serious difficulty: the complexity of these problems scales heavily with the size of the systems that are investigated. It appears that the number of parameters that show up in these equations is just too large to handle with any computer. So a physicist has to make approximations. On the one hand, these approximations cannot be too crude so they are still able to catch the important physical properties of the system. On the other hand, they must reduce the complexity of the system enough, so a computer can provide a solution. In the last decade, through the discovery of a new conceptual framework for understanding many-body systems, physicists have succeeded in finding this fine balance and have simulated an impressive range of many-body phenomena. This project picks in on these promising lines of research by providing advanced computational algorithms that focus on the dynamical properties of these quantum systems. This will allow us to simulate phenomena that have been observed in experiments, but continue to defy a theoretical understanding. In this way, we make a next step forward in understanding quantum many-body physics in a unified way." "The H boson gateway to physics beyond the Standard Model" "Department of Physics and astronomy" "In 2012, a scalar particle has been discovered at the LHC (CERN). As of today, its properties match those of the Higgs boson of the Standard Model (SM), the current theory of fundamental interactions. This discovery has crowned 50 years of research, including seminal work done in Belgium by Brout and Englert. It has also opened a new era for particle physicists, with more-than-ever pressing mysteries to face, including the absence, despite predictions and indirect indications, of signs of new physics at the LHC. The overarching objective of this project, lead by a collaboration of theorists and experimentalists, is to use the Higgs as a probe of still largely unexplored territories beyond the SM. First, we aim at more precisely determining the Higgs boson couplings within the SM, including its self-coupling. We will either discover new interactions, or will constrain the range of possibilities. Concurrently, we will look for new scalar particles, possible siblings of the Higgs boson, a challenging and far-reaching task. Second, we will focus on a special feature of the Higgs boson, that of providing a gateway to a whole new world of hidden particles and interactions, an exploration which may shed light on the dark matter and neutrino mysteries. The proposal brings together the young generation of physicists that has contributed to the discovery of the Higgs and now leads a broad, ambitious and original research project on the high-energy physics frontier." "Indeterminism and instabilmiteit in nineteenth-century physics" "Eric Schliesser" "Department of Philosophy and moral sciences" "This research is about the end-nineteenth-century debate about deterlinisme in physics, about the different ways in which physicists and philosophers could doubt or reject this determinism, and about whether the question if nature is deterministic was regarded(and should be regarded) as a purely physical or rather as a philosophical issue."