26th Australian Institute of Physics Congress and the Australian and New Zealand Conference on Optics and Photonics

Session

AIP TPG: Quantum tunneling

TPG

9 Dec 2026, 16:00

Belinda Hutchinson Building (The University of Sydney )

Conveners

AIP TPG: Quantum tunneling

• Daniel Terno

554. The role of magic and entanglement in collective tunnelling

Anna Birke (Australian National University)

09/12/2026, 16:00

AIP | Theoretical Physics (TPG)

Invited talk

Collective tunnelling involves the coherent tunnelling of several strongly interacting particles, and is central to, for example, stellar nuclear fusion. However, it remains difficult to describe theoretically, particularly using standard time-dependent mean-field approaches. Mean-field models such as time-dependent Hartree-Fock replace pair-wise particle correlations with an average one-body...

262. Particle Tunnelling in Quantum Field Theory

Aditya Singh Tejas (Australian National University)

09/12/2026, 16:30

AIP | Theoretical Physics (TPG)

Contributed Oral

Quantum tunnelling of a particle through a potential barrier, while widely understood in quantum mechanics, has yet to receive a systematic treatment in quantum field theory for particles coupled to an external background. We aim to determine QFT corrections to barrier tunnelling, which requires resummation of Feynman diagrams to all orders, as this interaction is non-perturbative in the...

511. Model-Independent Nuclear Charge Radius Extraction from Muonic X-Rays

Jack Morrow (The University of Queensland)

09/12/2026, 16:45

AIP | Theoretical Physics (TPG)

Contributed Oral

The energy levels of muonic atoms are highly sensitive to the nuclear charge distribution, which makes them useful probes of the nuclear charge radius. To extract the rms charge radius from the emitted X-rays, it is common to assume that the charge distribution $\rho(r)$ is given by the 2-parameter Fermi distribution. However, it is acknowledged in the literature that this simplistic...

724. Self-Consistent Muonic Orbitals and Nuclear Charge Distributions

Odile Smit (University of Queensland)

09/12/2026, 17:00

AIP | Theoretical Physics (TPG)

Contributed Oral

Muons are about 207 times heavier than an electron, but other than that have the same fundamental properties and, just like an electron, can orbit an atomic nucleus. Due to its mass, the orbit of the muon is much closer to the nucleus, making it very sensitive to the effects of the nuclear structure.

Conventional muonic binding energy calculations typically treat the influence of the muon...

243. Testing Hyperuniformity in Self-Assembled Point Structures Using Persistent Homology and Ideal Structure Estimation

Yanzhi Guo

09/12/2026, 17:15

AIP | Theoretical Physics (TPG)

Contributed Oral

Hyperuniform point patterns suppress density fluctuations at long wavelengths and provide an important framework for understanding order in crystals, quasicrystals, and disordered condensed matter. However, identifying hyperuniformity from finite, thermally fluctuating simulation data remains challenging, because conventional descriptors such as the pair-correlation function and structure...