Calum Ross

Reading Groups

At various points during my PhD and afterwards, I have been both an organiser and a participant in reading groups on a variety of topics. For several of these reading groups I maintained a webpage with a record of what was discussed and ocassionally a set of notes.

January 2017 - September 2017: I organised a reading group on String Theory and D-Branes following Richard J. Szabo. An Introduction to String Theory and D-Brane Dynamics (With Problems and Solutions). ICP, 2 edition, 2011. Notes from this reading group are included in the notes section below.

October 2017 - January 2018: I participated in a reading group renormalisation and effective field theories following the book by Costello. Following this reading group we decided to start a short seminar series, the details of which are here.

October 2018 - March 2019: I organised a reading group on Statistical Field Theory following David Tongs Lecture notes .

The reading group moved online in 2020 and I started to participate again.

October 2020 - April 2021: I organised a reading group on Yang-Mills Equations over Riemann Surfaces following the seminal paper by Atiyah and Bott. A partial webpage for this reading group is available here.

June 2022-July 2022: I was involved in a reading group on Nahm's equations and hyperkähler quotient constructions. A partial webpage is available here.

October 2022- March 2023: I am involved in a reading group about Instantons on gravitational instantions following the paper by Kronheimer and Nakajima. A rough webpage for the reading group is available here.

Notes

Here are a selection of notes that I made to remind myself about interesting topics that I started reading about. N.B some of the links might be dead as I have migrated files from my Heriot Watt webpage.

• Notes on moment maps and the Hyperkähler structure of the moduli space of solutions to Hitchin's Self-duality equations.
• Notes on String Theory relating to the reading group we are having. The plan was that everyone would contribute to these notes but in the end it was just me. There are a couple of gaps where I did not have time to tex up some of the computations that we discussed.
• Notes for a talk I gave on classical bosonic membrane dynamics as part of our D-Brane reading group.
• Notes on rational maps that I made to remind myself of their properties and relation to vortices.
• Martin Wolf from the university of Surrey gave a short introductory course on Twistor theory at Heriot-Watt from 27/11/17-30/11/17. The lectures contained many exercises and some of us spent some time solving them. The exercises and our sketch solutions are here.
• Some notes on Monopoles, mini-twistors and spectral curves that I made ( am still making) while reading papers about the topics so that I could keep some conventions to hand.