Professor Olalla Castro Alvaredo

Overview

Prof Castro Alvaredo studied Particle Physics of the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain) from 1993 to 1997. At the end of this period she graduated with Honours and with the highest grade of her year. Immediately afterwards she joined the Particle Physics department of the same university with a 4 year research fellowship from the Spanish Ministry of Education. From 1997 to 1999 she carried out her MSc Thesis under the supervision of Prof. J. Luis Miramontes. Thereafter she started working in her PhD which she carried out to a large extent as a visitor at the Freie Universität Berlin (Germany) working under the supervision of Prof. A. Fring. She obtained her PhD in July 2001.

After her graduation she obtained a 3 year research fellowship at the Freie Universität Berlin (Germany) where she pursued her scientific collaboration with Prof. Fring. At the end of this period she was awarded a research fellowship at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon (France) where she spent the 14 months prior to her appointment as a Lecturer at City University London, in March 2005.

Prof. Castro Alvaredo's research interests lie in quantum integrable models, especially field theories. Her main areas of research are the bootstrap program, entanglement measures and out-of-equilibrium dynamics, mainly in the context of integrable field theory. 

 

At the beginning of her research career Prof. Castro-Alvaredo trained mainly with Prof. Fring with whom she coauthored around 30 research papers on the bootstrap program. Using the techniques that she learned from this work (i.e. Bethe Ansatz and Form Factors) she has gone on to develop other related areas of research.  Since 2007 she has been working on the computation of entanglement measures in integrable quantum field theories. These quantitities provide a measure of the amount of entanglement that may be stored in a quantum state. The investigation of the properties of the entanglement entropy has attracted much attention in recent years as it has applications in many areas, from black holes, to quantum computing. Prof Castro-Alvaredo has made many contributions to this area since 2007, starting with her work with Prof. J. L. Cardy and Prof B. Doyon where the so-called branch point twist field approach to entanglement measures in gapped quanum systems was developed. This work has been followed by many publications looking at the entanglement content of quasi-particle excitations, in the presence of boundaries,  for non-unitary theories, and in out-of-equilibrium situations, among other topics. 

Since 2014 Prof. Castro Alvaredo has also made significant contributions to the growing field of out-of-equilibrium dynamics in one-dimensional many-body quantum systems. Notably, a work published in 2016 in collaboration with B. Doyon and T. Yoshimura has led to the development of a new area of research based on the Generalized Hydrodynamics approach to out-of-equilibrium phenomena. In 2025, together with her co-authors, she has been distinguished with the Frotiers of Science Award for this work. 

Prof Castro Alvaredo has been Admissions Tutor and Programme Director for Mathematics at the Department of Mathematics of City St George's, University of London and is currently Deputy Programme Director for Undergradaute Programmes.  She is currently a member of the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion committee of her School and her School representative at the University Gender Equity Comittee. She has been a member of the Athena Swan Committee for both school submissions. 

Prof Castro Alvaredo has held prestigious international appointments, such as an Emmy Noether Fellowship of the PI institute (Canada). She is currently Handling Editor for the journal Nuclear Physics B (Elsevier) and Co-Organizer of Research Programs at the Galileo Galilei Institute in Florence (Italy). 

Qualifications

• PhD in Theoretical Physics, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Spain, September 1998 - July 2001
• MSc in Particle Physics, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Spain, 1997 - September 1998
• BSc Physics, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Spain, September - July 1997

Employment

• Professor of Theoretical Physics, City St Georges, University of London, United Kingdom, August 2025 - present
• Member of the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Committee, City, University of London, UK, August 2019 - present
• Reader in Theoretical Physics, City, University of London, United Kingdom, August 2017 - present
• Senior Lecturer in Mathematics, City, University of London, United Kingdom, August 2009 - July 2017
• Lecturer in Mathematics, City, University of London, United Kingdom, March 2005 - August 2009
• Postdoctoral Fellow, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France, January 2002 - February 2005
• Postdoctoral Fellow, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, January 2001 - December 2003

Languages

English (can read, write, speak, understand spoken, peer review), French (can read, write, speak, understand spoken, peer review), Galician (can read, write, speak, understand spoken, peer review), German (can read, write, speak, understand spoken), Italian (can read, understand spoken), Portuguese (can read, understand spoken) and Spanish; Castilian (can read, write, speak, understand spoken, peer review)

Teaching

Teaching Experience

MA1600 Functions, Vectors and Calculus (2012-2014)
MA1613 Ciphers and Number Theory (2012-present)
MA3602 Mathematical Methods (2014-present)
MA1603/AS1054 Programming (2005-2010)
MA2605 Dynamical Systems (2010-2013)
MA2601 Calculus (2005-2009)
MA0001 Computational Mathematics (2007)

Project Supervision

Since joining City I have supervised final year projects on many topics, including:

Chaos and Fractals
The Theory of Partitions
Somos Sequences
The Millennium Problems
The Logistic Equation
The Mathematics of the Heart

Summary of my Research

I am a theoretical physicist working in Quantum Field Theory (QFT). I specialize on the study of integrable 1+1-dimensional QFTs and other related theories, such as conformal field theories and integrable quantum spin chains.
Integrable models posses extra symmetries (that is, a large or infinite number of conserved quantities). This leads to very strong constraints on the form and value of all their physical quantities. Integrability combined with the restriction to one space dimension allows for the formulation of theories whose scattering amplitudes, form factors and correlation functions may be computed exactly. The systematic computation of these quantities is referred to as the "Bootstrap Programme" and it has attracted a great deal of attention over the last four decades.

Much of the work that I have carried out relates to the development of such a programme, that is, computing scattering matrices, form factors and correlation functions in a variety of models and investigating their analytical properties and mathematical structures. Most of my work in these areas has been carried out in collaboration with Prof. Andreas Fring. In the context of quantum spin chains I have performed form factor calculations for mixed systems in collaboration with Prof. Jean-Michel Maillet.

Since 2007 I have been applying some of the techniques above to the development of a systematic approach to the computation of the entanglement entropy associated to a the ground state of integrable QFTs and quantum spin chains. This work has been carried out initially in collaboration with Dr Benjamin Doyon and Prof. John Cardy and continues to be pursued in collaboration with Dr Doyon and my PhD students Dr Emanuele Levi and Mr Davide Bianchini.

My most recent interest has been the extension of some of the integrability techniques mentioned earlier to the study of integrable quantum field theories out of equilibrium. This has lead to a recent paper in collaboration with Dr B. Doyon, Ms M. Hoogeveen and Mr Y. Chen.

Key areas of research

- Bootstrap program for integrable 2 dimensional quantum field theories
- Correlation functions in integrable quantum spin chains
- Bi-partite Entanglement Entropy of integrable Quantum Field Theories and Quantum Spin Chains
- Out-of-equilibrium properties of integrable systems (heat current)

Research students

Publications by category