Hi, I'm Thomas, I'm a fourth year Theoretical Physics student at Trinity College Dublin. I am a big fan of open-source philosophy, so I mainly made this site to host my course notes so feel free to check them out. You can also check out my github page here. Im an aspiring Theoretical Physicist and will be doing a MASt in Theoretical Physics at St Johns College, Cambridge next year.
Some of the things I have been working on including various internships and personal projects.
My Final Year Project investitigated many aspsects of investigating several aspects of Qunatum Field Theory (QFT) in curved spacetimes. This is the study of quantum fields propagating in a classical gravitational field. My research began with a detailed study of the Unruh Effect and Hawking radiation. The primary goal of this project was to take these ideas learned from the Unruh Affect and Hawking Radiation and use them to analyse Raphael Bousso and Stephen Hawking's paper titled "(Anti-)Evaporation of Schwarzschild -de Sitter Black Holes". Here a Schwarzschild black hole is immersed in de Sitter spacetime and it is shown that different quantum fluctuations of the metric lead to some stable and some evaporating modes. Click on the image to view my thesis.
In 2024, as an intern with Breakthrough Listen Search for Extra-terrestrial Life (SETI), I focused my research on the analysis of single pulse detection algorithms; which are useful in the detection of Fast Radio bursts and exotic pulsar systems. I analysed several different algorithms and built a pipeline that created synthetic pulses and benchmarked them against each other over a wide parameter space to see where each was best. My results showed that a popular algorithm is not sensitive to wide-width pulses, meaning some detections could have been missed in several surveys.
The TPSA is a student led organisation based in Trinity. The TPSA runs weekley seminars where students enter a collaborative space to discuss homework problems or ask physics questions of the older years. The association also hosts hackathons, faculty talks as well as workshops to help fellow students. Currently I am the associations treasurer. I also recently conducted an ”Introduction to LaTeX” talk, to introduce the younger students to the typesetting language.
As part of the TPSA I also had the great pleasure of being captain of the highly successful 2023/24 PLANCKS team. PLANCKS is a exam-based physics competition for bachelor’s and master’s students. I captained the team representing Trinity at the UK & Ireland preliminary in Surrey, where we qualified to represent Ireland at the final held in Dublin, Ireland.