Ingemar Bengtsson

My name is Ingemar Bengtsson, and I have been a lecturer at Fysikum in Stockholm since '93 (and a professor since '00). My previous "career" was at Chalmers, CERN and Imperial College.

This is me (as drawn by Jörgen Hansson in '73)
The research areas that I like the best usually have something to do with geometry. General relativity is a favourite. Most of my work there is on black holes. My strongest prejudice is that the world has four dimensions; this is the direction in which I look for clues about quantum gravity. Then I work on quantum information theory, since the geometry of the space of quantum states is wonderful and rather mysterious. What I find fascinating about relativity and quantum mechanics---as it happens, the two deepest theories we have---is that their basic equations have been around for almost a hundred years, and yet they keep springing conceptual surprises on us. I am looking for the next surprise (but I do keep a weather eye open on other subjects as well).

The things that are on my mind at the moment are trapped surfaces in black holes, complementary measurements in quantum mechanics, and the existence of special sets of equiangular vectors in Hilbert space (this translates in the laboratory into a very special kind of measurement).

I am told that some scientists think that there is something queer going on in the Universe while others, on the whole, don't. I tend towards the former viewpoint, but this is probably not apparent from my published papers. Some examples of those are:

 

Of course, not all my papers are published.

 

With Karol Zyczkowski from Krakow I have written a book on quantum mechanics, seen through our eyes. It was published by Cambridge University Press in April 2006. You can still get it:

 

I occasionally try to write popular science articles. They are all in Swedish:

 

In the department I am a member of the "KOMKO" group, which includes the (informal) Relativity group (it has a little homepage of its own), as well as the group for Quantum Information and Quantum Optics.

My views on teaching happen to be identical to those of Fred Hoyle, as expressed in " The Universe: Past and present reflections " (Ann. Rev. Astr. Astrophys. 1982), so there is no need to repeat them here.

This academic year I teach Statistical physics and Analytical mechanics. (In English, since English speaking students are welcome.)

·  Statistisk fysik I. My lectures followed a book---a splendid book---by Manfred Schroeder, "An Introduction to Thermal Physics", especially part III, and parts of chapter 5. I assumed that the participants have some familiarity with parts I and II of the book, but not that they had understood them perfectly. The program for 2012 (including exercises etc) is here: Statistical Physics. You can also see some old exams if you like.

Analytisk mekanik. The official book is Goldstein, Poole och Safko: Classical Mechanics, third edition. This book is rather verbose, and in fact my course follows my own lecture notes (see below). The program, including exercises, for 2012 is here: Analytical Mechanics. You can see some old exams if you like (there were bonus points for those who did their hand-in exercises): Exams.

Examples of lecture notes:

 

I enjoy supervising Master's Theses and such things. Some recent ones include "Trapped surfaces in 2+1 dimensions" by Emma Jakobsson, “The convex hull of spin coherent states” by Muhammad Sadiq, "Conformal compactification and anti-de Sitter space" by Valentina Di Carlo, "Gleason's theorem" by Helena Granström, and "The rotationally invariant dispersion measure" by Ahmed Abdelrahman. My graduate students are Kate Blanchfield and Emma Jakobsson.

My Erdös number is 3. My Einstein number is 4. And one more thing. A quote from James Lovelock, which I had occasion to think about, some time ago actually:

"Of all the prizes that come from surviving more than fifty years, the best is the freedom to be eccentric."

 

Email:

ibeng@fysik.su.se