Soliton Games: Exploring the Scattering Fractal
We are pleased to announce a talk by Filip Blaschke and his PhD student Lukas Rafaj who are visiting the Maths department and will deliver the PQM discussion group talk on 28 Oct 2026. They also present a talk at the Maths Colloqium on Tuesday, 27 Oct at 2pm during their visit.
The PQM DG talk will cover:
Soliton Games: Exploring the Scattering Fractal
Abstract:
We present a basic overview of the dynamics of kinks in scalar field theories in 1+1 dimensions. In particular, we focus on their scattering with anti-kinks by means of a pedagogical minigame, where we try to reconstruct the initial velocity from the field profile. We attempt (but ultimately fail) to establish what minimal information one needs to master this game. However, by doing so, we uncover a surprising connection between bouncing behaviour, formation of bions and the way the field dips below the lower vacuum during each collision.