About Me

I completed my undergraduate degree at the University of Birmingham in 2019 and took the Cambridge Part III course (MASt) before joining the Keeling & Lovett groups at St-Andrews in August 2020. Having completed a PhD in theoretical physics in Spring 2024, I moved to San Diego where I am currently working as a postdoc at UCSD with Joel Yuen-Zhou.

Contact

The best way to get in touch with me is via my institutional email, pfw1@st-andrews.ac.uk.

Publications

Please see my Google Scholar profile.

Thesis

My PhD thesis Mean-field and cumulant approaches to modelling organic polariton physics is available on the St Andrews Research Repository as well as arXiv. I'll aim to keep the arXiv version updated, and note changes or errata here.

Research Interests

• Tensor network methods to study open quantum systems (see OQuPy)
• Mean-field approaches to study many-body open quantum systems
• Polariton transport and lasing in organic microcavities

Linux system administration and software carpentry

I currently hold a Linux Professional Institute LPIC-1 qualification for the deployment and administration of Linux systems and networks—get in touch if you want to know more. You may also like to have a look at the Udemy Course I run for the certification. I typically have a number of discount or free course codes to give out, so please ask!

I am also a certified instructor for The Carpentries community and regularly taught at workshops in St Andrews. A list of upcoming workshops is available on The Carpentries website as well as lesson material.

Cycling

The following are a few of many adventures...

SUCH 2023

My most recent adventure was the fourth edition of the Swiss Ultracycling Challenge or SUCH, a 1,000km free-route bike race around the cantons of Switzerland. Follow this link for a full ride report with photos. It's a good 'un!

Colorado 2023

In June 2023 I did a short cycling tour of the Colorado Rocky Mountains off the back of a research conference I attended at the Telluride Science & Innovation Center. The route and a diary entries from each day of the tour may be found on this page.

Edinburgh-Munich-Edinburgh 2022

In September 2022 I cycled to Munich and back to attend a research conference, Molecular Polaritonics. You can find a summary of the route and a collection of my notes from each day's riding here. A a short article on my adventure was also published in issue 159 (Spring 2023) of Arrivée, the magazine for Audax UK members.

Fife

Using the heatmap layer from Google's visualisation library and a bit of ImageMagick, I created a timelapse of the gpx data from my first 30 days in Fife: Get some popcorn!

Have an annual distance goal? You can use this simple calculator to work out how much you need to cover each month, week or day.

Lecture Notes

National 5 Physics (2022-2023)

• Summary notes and exercises for sections Dynamics, Space, Electricity, Matter, Waves & Radiation

Part III Mathematics (2019-2020)

• Non-equilibrium Steady States and Stochastic Thermodynamics (Rob Jack) Notes
• Soft Matter on Manifolds (Ronojoy Adhikari) Notes
• Hybrid Photonics Computing (Natalia Berloff) Notes
• Essay: Large Deviations and Slow Dynamics in Classical and Quantum Systems Essay

Seminars

Part III Seminar Series (2019-2020)

• March 2020: Kinetically Constrained Models and the Glass Transition Abstract Handout
• December 2020: Towards High Temperature Superconductivity - A Resonating Valence Bond State in Pyrochlore Abstract Handout Further Reading

Also on the web

• OQuPy: I help maintain the OQuPy Python package on Github
• Graph Theory: Javascript App demonstrating the graph realisation problem