Supervisor: Dmitri Fedorov

Title: Particle Physics with Rubik’s Cubes

A Rubik’s Cube is toy from the eighties which is a very tangible tool for understanding group theory, but can it also be used in assisting understanding of physics? Gauge Theory also builds upon groups and symmetries, so can the Rubik’s Cube be used as a more approachable analogy? What does conservation laws look like on a Rubik’s Cube?

This talk will first describe the structure of the Cube for those unfamiliar, and then move into the Rubik’s Cube analogy of gauge theory. This will hopefully motivate the intuition for why imposing local symmetries leads to gauge fields (Electromagnetism, Weak, and Strong forces). Conservation laws will then lead to a way of uniquely representing elementary particles as orbits of a Rubik’s Cube. The culmination is that interactions, as seen in a Feynman diagram can be understood as an interference of orbits.