Professor Roderich Moessner
Credit: Hertford College, Oxford

Lamb public lecture 2025

24 Nov 2025
Public talks and lectures
Time
-
Venue
Martin Wood Lecture Theatre
Martin Wood Complex, Department of Physics, University of Oxford, Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3PU
Speaker(s)

Professor Roderich Moessner, Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems

Knowledge of physics?
No, knowledge of physics not required
For more information contact

The Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics at Oxford is hosting its fourth annual series of Willis Lamb Lectures in Theoretical Physics. Willis E. Lamb Jr, Nobel Prize in Physics 1955, was Wykeham Professor at Oxford from 1956-1962.

For this series, we are delighted to welcome Professor Roderich Moessner from Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems as our guest lecturer. 

Lecture 5-6pm: Q&A 6-6.30pm.

Fractionalisation: Dividing the Indivisible

Common sense states that if you only have 1 pound coins, you can combine them to make 2 pounds but not 50 pence. However, it turns out that many-body physics provides ways of going beyond such common sense, and allows us to circumvent obstacles naively thought to be insurmountable. For instance, we know how to divide apparently indivisible objects: the charge of an electron can be split into three parts; or the north and south poles of a bar magnet can be separated at will. This talk explains how this can happen, and notes some resulting deeper insights into the nature of matter, and how the natural and artificial world around us is organised.

As well as the public Lamb lecture, Professor Moessner will be giving two technical lectures: