Lena Funcke

Lena Funcke profile picture
Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics
Postdoctoral Researcher
Areas of research:
Cosmology
Particle Physics
My research focuses on two complementary approaches to tackle the fundamental open problems of the Standard Model of particle physics. First, I develop models beyond the Standard Model to explain the mysteries of the small neutrino masses and the strong CP problem. For this, I combine and transfer knowledge on non-perturbative topological phenomena between QCD, gravity, and neutrino physics, with substantial implications for late-time cosmology. Second, I explore numerical lattice techniques based on lattice QCD, tensor networks, deep learning, and quantum computing. While most of these techniques currently focus on lower-dimensional theories, my long-term goal is to apply them to study non-perturbative phenomena in the 3+1 dimensional Standard Model and beyond.
  • 2015 - 2018, LMU Munich and Max Planck Institute for Physics, PhD, summa cum laude, advisor: Prof. Gia Dvali
  • 2014 - 2015, University of Cambridge, MASt, distinction, advisor: Dr. Alexander Mitov
  • Dieter Rampacher Prize, 2018, Max Planck Society
  • Arnold Sommerfeld PhD Prize, 2018, LMU Munich
  • Lena Funcke, Karl Jansen, Stefan Kühn, Topological vacuum structure of the Schwinger model with matrix product states, Phys. Rev. D 101, 054507 (2020), arXiv: 1908.00551 [hep-lat]
  • Lena Funcke, Georg Raffelt, Edoardo Vitagliano, Distinguishing Dirac and Majorana neutrinos by their gravi-majoron decays, Phys. Rev. D 101, 015025 (2020), arXiv: 1905.01264 [hep-ph]
  • Christiane S. Lorenz, Lena Funcke, Erminia Calabrese, Steen Hannestad, Time-varying neutrino mass from a supercooled phase transition: current cosmological constraints and impact on the Omega_m-sigma_8 plane, Phys. Rev. D 99 (2019) 023501, arXiv: 1811.01991 [astro-ph.CO]
  • Gia Dvali, Lena Funcke, Small neutrino masses from gravitational theta-term, Phys. Rev. D 93 (2016) 113002, arXiv: 1602.03191 [hep-ph]
  • Kim A. Nicoli, Christopher J. Anders, Lena Funcke, Tobias Hartung, Karl Jansen, Pan Kessel, Shinichi Nakajima, Paolo Stornati, On Estimation of Thermodynamic Observables in Lattice Field Theories with Deep Generative Models, arXiv: 2007.07115 [hep-lat]
  • Lena Funcke, Tobias Hartung, Karl Jansen, Stefan Kühn, Paolo Stornati, Xiaoyang Wang, Measurement error mitigation in quantum computers through classical bit-flip correction, arXiv: 2007.03663 [quant-ph]
  • Constantia Alexandrou, Jacob Finkenrath, Lena Funcke, Karl Jansen, Bartosz Kostrzewa, Ferenc Pittler, Carsten Urbach, Ruling out the massless up-quark solution to the strong CP problem by computing the topological mass contribution with lattice QCD, arXiv: 2002.07802 [hep-lat]
  • Gia Dvali, Lena Funcke, Domestic Axion, arXiv: 1608.08969 [hep-ph]