Research News

A study carried out by Jordi Mazón and David Pino from the Department of Physics together with Lluís Bassaganya, Jordi Mercader and Jordi Moré asks what kind of weather the republican exiles suffered in the Camprodon valley.

Pau Mir Garcia defended his thesis co-supervised by Eva Miranda on January 16 at the FME. Entitled "Singularities and symmetries on the crossroads of geometry and physics", the thesis presents the study of several mathematical objects that are essential for formulating and modeling physical systems. Through tools provided by differential geometry, this thesis develops and analyzes different mathematical structures that are used in three physical contexts: dissipative dynamics, integrable systems and geometric quantization. To do this, we mainly use the framework of b-symplectic geometry, a natural extension of symplectic geometry especially suitable for bounded manifolds, based on the concept of differential b-forms.

An international consortium of universities, hospitals and companies, led by the UPC, is developing new technologies based on photonics and artificial intelligence to improve the diagnosis of various diseases.

Mingyue Yuan defended his thesis directed by Trinitat Pradell Cara on 17th of November at Campus Diagonal Besos. Entitled "Historical copper and iron colored glazes and glasses", the thesis presents an understanding of the mechanisms of coloring and compositional differences in historical enamels and glasses, and offers valuable information on ancient glassmaking technologies.

Quasiparticles are an essential tool to describe the complex processes arising from strong interactions in solids. These quasiparticles can be simulated and accurately studied in a radically different system, i.e., an ultracold quantum gas. Now scientists have been able to observe in an actual experiment how quasiparticles called Fermi polarons interact with each other. Their findings have been published in Nature Physics.

Deimos Ibáñez Segura defended his thesis co-directed by Adrià Rovira Garcia and Jaume Sanz Subirana on October 23 at the North Campus. Titled "Contributions to multi-purpose GNSS positioning to support multi-frequency and multi-constellation with high accuracy and integrity", the thesis presents, on the one hand, different methods for GNSS processing (multi-constellation, multi-frequency, fast convergence, integrity and maritime applications), and on the other hand the study of different components that affect GNSS positioning (such as the ionosphere, errors in the signal in space). All the processing is furthermore integrated into a tool, gLAB, aimed at both professionals and students, which already has an international impact and with the improvements made in this thesis will significantly increase its impact.

Baoying Wang defended her thesis co-supervised by Alvaro Meseguer and Fernando Mellibovsky on September 21 at the North Campus. Entitled "Transitional Coherent Structures in Shear and Centrifugally Driven Flows", the thesis computationally presents the mechanisms for creating coherent structures (invariants of the Navier-Stokes equations) pre-turbulent in rotating and/or shearing fluids.