Anders Kvellestad

Academic Interests

I study extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics, focusing on supersymmetry and theories with additional Higgs bosons. I'm particularly interested in how such theories can be tested experimentally at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, and the interplay between LHC results and theoretical requirements for explaining dark matter and the dominance of matter over antimatter in the universe.

A related topic that interests me is how different statistical methods - both Bayesian and frequentist - can be used to squeeze the maximum amount of information from the results of the wide range of particle and astroparticle physics experiments. I have also taken up an interest in machine learning (deep neural networks, gaussian processes, ...) and how these techniques can be utilized to perform more comprehensive analyses of particle physics theories than have previously been possible.

The largest project I am part of is GAMBIT (the Global And Modular Beyond-the-Standard-Model Inference Tool), which I co-founded back in 2012. We are a collaboration of 30-odd particle and astroparticle theorists and experimentalists, as well as experts on statistics and scientific computing, from all around the globe. Together we have developed a highly modular and efficient software package for performing large-scale statistical analyses ("global fits") of new particle physics theories. GAMBIT is of course fully open source and the code is available from both our webpage and GitHub. In addition to developing GAMBIT and making it available to the community, we are ourselves using GAMBIT for an ambitious program of physics studies. A list of GAMBIT-related publications can be found here - and more results are in the pipeline.

Invitation to interdisciplinary collaboration

Even though GAMBIT is developed mainly by particle physicists, we have structured the code such that it can just as well be used for statistical analyses (parameter estimation and model comparison) in other fields of science. If you think GAMBIT might be useful for your research don't hesitate to send me an email! (GAMBIT is for instance used in an ongoing data analysis study within cancer research.) GAMBIT provides a collection of parallelized optimization algorithms (differential evolution, nested sampling, MCMC, ...) and a framework for connecting these algorithms to model-specific tools implemented in C, C++, Pyhton, Fortran or Mathematica. It is also possible to use an additional layer of parallelization to speed up the model-specific computations.

Publications

An up-to-date overview of my scientific publications can be found on inspirehep.net.

Recent scientific talks

• GAMBIT: What is it and where is it going?, Nordic Conference on Particle Physics, Skeikampen, 04.01.18.
• An introduction to GAMBIT, Dartmouth-TRIUMF-University of Washington HEP/Cosmo Tools Bootcamp, 26.10.17.
• First SUSY results with GAMBIT, DESY Theory Workshop, Hamburg, 27.09.17.
• A short and sweet GAMBIT tutorial, TOOLS 2017, Corfu, 13.09.17.
• First SUSY results with GAMBIT, EPS-HEP 2017, Venice, 07.07.17.
• Disfavouring EWBG and a hidden Higgs in a THDM, Norwegian Theory Meeting, Stavanger, 19.06.17.
• An update on GAMBIT, LHC recast workshop, CERN, 13.12.16.

Outreach

I find great joy in communicating physics and try to engage in outreach activities as often as time allows. In particular, I believe that an honest exposition of the human aspects of physics research and the far from straightforward interplay between physics, philosophy and history can help improve the public understanding of - and engagement with - physics and science in general.

Below is a collection of links to some of my past outreach activities.

Videos

• Waiter, there's a particle in my quantum field! (Norwegian). A talk about quantum field theory. (The video is unfortunately missing a couple of minutes due to a technical problem.) Date: 28.02.17.
• The dark matter mystery. I co-wrote the script for this short animated movie about dark matter. Date: 07.12.15.
• Chasing the invisible (Norwegian). A short talk on dark matter, presented on board "the Thinking Train" going from Oslo to Trondheim. Date: 24.09.15.
• Superb symmetries and dark mysteries (Norwegian). A talk about the role of symmetry in physics and how this relates to the hunt for dark matter. Date: 18.03.15.

Texts, radio appearances and other activities

• I often discuss physics and science on Twitter, mostly in Norwegian. (But be warned, there is also quite a bit of politics, music and random nonsense.) Date: too often.
• I semi-regularly participate in the science panel of the Norwegian radio/TV show "Abel's Tower" on NRK, most recently on 17.11.17 and 09.06.17.
• An interview on open access publishing and the use of preprints (Norwegian). Date: 27.10.17
• Tumbling down a quantum rabbit hole. An essay on a very strange but deeply fascinating interpretation of quantum mechanics. Date: 29.09.17.
• An interview on the "750 GeV bump" that looked so intriguing back in late 2015 (Norwegian). Date: 16.12.15
• An interview on some LHC data that looked very interesting back in 2014 (Norwegian). Date: 07.11.14.

Education and employment history

• 2017 - current: Researcher, University of Oslo and Imperial College London
• 2015 - 2017: Postdoctoral Fellow, Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics (NORDITA), Stockholm
• 2011 - 2015: Ph.D., University of Oslo
• 2009 - 2011: M.Sc., University of Bergen
• 2006 - 2009: B.Sc., University of Bergen and University of Copenhagen

Publications

An up-to-date overview of my scientific publications can be found on inspirehep.net.