Damien George

I am a PhD student in the School of Physics at the University of Melbourne. I am a member of the Theoretical Particle Physics group. My supervisor is Ray Volkas. You might be able to find me in room 406 of the physics building.

Physics

Physics is fun and one day I might understand how the world works, but for now I spend time thinking about:

• realistic brane-world models
• the Standard Model
• quantum field theory and path integrals
• information and the physics of it

Papers that I have been involved with (most recent first):

• A. Davidson, D.P. George, A. Kobakhidze, R.R. Volkas and K.C. Wali, SU(5) grand unification on a domain-wall brane from an E_6-invariant action, Phys. Rev. D 77 085031 (2008), arXiv:0710.3432
• R. Davies, D.P. George and R.R. Volkas, The standard model on a domain-wall brane?, Phys. Rev. D 77 124038 (2008), arXiv:0705.1584
• R. Davies and D.P. George, Fermions, scalars and Randall-Sundrum gravity on domain-wall branes, Phys. Rev. D 76 104010 (2007), arXiv:0705.1391
• D.P. George and R.R. Volkas, Kink modes and effective four dimensional fermion and Higgs brane models, Phys. Rev. D 75 105007 (2007), arXiv:hep-ph/0612270
• E. Di Napoli, D. George, M. Hertzberg, F. Metzler and E. Siegel, Dark Matter In Minimal Trinification, Proceedings of the LXXXVI Les Houches Summer School, pages 517--524 (2006), arXiv:hep-ph/0611012
• D.P. George and R.R. Volkas, Stability of domain walls coupled to Abelian gauge fields, Phys.Rev. D 72 105011 (2005), arXiv:hep-ph/0508206
• G. Dando, A. Davidson, D.P. George, R.R. Volkas and K.C. Wali, The clash of symmetries in a Randall-Sundrum-like spacetime, Phys.Rev. D 72 045016 (2005), arXiv:hep-ph/0507097

Spires listing of papers.

Selected presentations that I have given (most recent first):

• (PDF) PhD completion seminar, University of Melbourne, October 2008.
• (PDF) Particle theory seminar, Cornell University, NY, USA, March 2008.
• (PDF) Relativity/cosmology/high energy physics seminar, Syracuse University, NY, USA, February 2008.
• (PDF) GOSS talk (graduate seminar series), University of Melbourne, April 2007.

My honours thesis.

Mathematics

Mathematics is a language. A language is a tool. Tools can be replaced. It just so happens that mathematics is the best language we have at the moment to talk about physics.

Robotics

I studied robotics as part of my undergraduate degree. This included participating in Robocup 2002, an international robotics competition where teams program robots to autonomously play soccer against each other. Our team came in 4th place, out of 19 teams. There are some photos of the competition.

The paper that resulted from my Robocup work:

• Particle Attraction Localisation, by D. George, N. Barnes, Proc. IEEE/RSJ Interational Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS2003), Las Vegas, USA, Nov., 2003. (PDF)

I built a simple walking robot that can follow a blue light.

At the moment I am building a CNC machine.

Computers

Computers were made by physicists. Computers were made to be programmed. Computers were made by physicists to be programmed to solve their problems. Don't ask me to fix your computer problems!

Miscellaneous non-technical things

How to make tofu.