Berend Visser

Profile

Biography

I got my master's degree in theoretical physics at the Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Afterwards, I switched to mathematical physics to do a PhD here at York, supervised by Eli Hawkins and Chris Fewster.

My primary research interests are in the mathematical foundations of quantum field theory (QFT). My present work focuses on the functional formalism in perturbative algebraic QFT, which mixes analysis on infinite dimensional manifolds with microlocal analysis.

In this formalism, a desirable quality of a model is the 'time-slice property', which, roughly, states that the observables of the theory are dynamical in the way one would expect. This property has been shown for a large range of models of QFT, but when lifting these proofs to the realm of smooth functionals, unwanted singularities can be shown to pop up. I am trying to find a slightly smaller class of observables that does not exhibit this singular behaviour, but is still large enough to allow for a wide range of operations.