James Inglis - The Standard Model and Beyond: From the LHC to Black Hole Microstructure

Wednesday 11 Nov 2026, 13:30 → 15:00 Europe/London

610 (G.O. Jones Bulding)

https://cern.zoom.us/j/67501511814?pwd=4RlJLpbhXENmVQVLaPAbMuweQ5xIwM.1

About the speaker: 

James is a final-year postgraduate student at Queen Mary University of London, supervised by Eram Rizvi. He submitted his thesis in late September and is due to complete his viva on 25th November.

James is a member of the ATLAS Collaboration and has undertaken two separate research projects within ATLAS. The first focused on optimising the ATLAS trigger system, which is designed to filter out proton-proton collisions at the LHC and select the most interesting events for further analysis. The second project involved the statistical fitting of the Standard Model Effective Field Theory (SMEFT). In addition to his work within ATLAS, James has undertaken a theoretical physics research project investigating black hole microstructure, working with Rodolfo Russo from the School of Mathematical Sciences. This seminar will focus on these latter two projects.

Prior to joining Queen Mary, James completed an integrated master's degree in Mathematics and Chemistry at Durham University. Although initially studied as largely separate disciplines, mathematics and chemistry became increasingly interconnected as his undergraduate studies progressed, ultimately leading him towards quantum physics. This sparked his interest in pursuing further study in particle physics.

13:30 → 14:00 Biscuits and Coffee

14:00 → 15:00 The Standard Model and Beyond: From the LHC to Black Hole Microstructure

The Standard Model has been very reliable and successful, explaining the vast majority of observed physical phenomena. However, despite its successes, the Standard Model is not without its shortcomings and is known to be incomplete. It is of interest to search for the effects of new physics in a model-independent yet quantifiable manner, and the Standard Model Effective Field Theory (SMEFT) offers an attractive way of achieving this.
Beyond the SM, the true physics behind black holes remains a longstanding mystery. In particular, understanding the inner structure of black holes, and how their macroscopic properties emerge from their microscopic degrees of freedom, remains a fundamental challenge in theoretical physics. The D1-D5 system, a five-dimensional black hole system with an explicit description in string theory, provides a valuable theoretical framework to investigate these questions.
This talk will cover two distinct research projects exploring these questions from different perspectives. The first will focus on using experimental collider data to constrain physics beyond the SM through the SMEFT. Following an introduction to the SMEFT, its theoretical motivation and its strengths as a framework for probing new physics will be discussed. This will be followed by a case study exploring the SMEFT interpretation of an ATLAS measurement of the charged-current Drell–Yan process (arXiv:2502.21088).
The second part of the talk will turn to black hole microstructure, introducing black holes and some of the outstanding questions surrounding their microscopic description, before discussing how black hole solutions can be constructed in string theory. The concept of fortuity will then be introduced as a means of characterising black hole microstates. Explicit examples of microstate classification and corresponding dynamical calculations will be presented, based on recent work (arXiv:2606.20353).

Convener: James Matthew Inglis (Queen Mary)

epp_seminar_11_11_26.pdf