Physics notes

Here are notes on physics I've accumulated over the years, ordered chronologically. Their lengths and subjects vary but they have been useful to me at times, so they might be useful to others as well. Comments are welcome!

• Airfoil theory (in French): How airflow generates lift on the wings of airplanes. Based on a Master project with Gregory Kozyreff and Bernard Knaepen.

• Li-Yorke theorem (in French): How the presence of orbits of period 3 in a discrete-time dynamical system essentially implies chaos, with applications to the celebrated logistic map.

• Asymptotic symmetries and black hole entropy (in French): How large-distance symmetries of general relativity contain information about black hole microstates. Master thesis supervised by Glenn Barnich.

• Hawking temperature and Wick rotation. Based on discussions with fellow PhD students in Brussels.

• Dimensional reduction of 3D gravity: How general relativity in (2+1) dimensions can be seen as an explicit (1+1)-dimensional CFT. An unpublished project with Glenn Barnich and Hernan Gonzalez.

• Berry phases for scalar vacua: How the ground state of a quantum field depends on external sources, and how varying sources produces Berry phases. The simplest example of a Berry phase with infinitely many parameters.

• A short essay on Berry phases of asymptotic symmetries, published as a CQG+ blog post.

• Correlations and entanglement in SSH: How free-fermion methods yield entanglement entropy in an SSH chain, and how this exhibits a critical point. Contains a thorough review of the relation between entanglement and correlations in free fermionic systems. Based on a collaboration with Benoît Estienne.