Information for speakers

The organisation of the seminars

Dear Speaker,

Here is some information for you to understand the setup of the seminar series for which you are invited.

The two Brussels universities, ULB and VUB, and the K.U.Leuven share a weekly seminar day. It takes place one week in Brussels and the other week in Leuven, independent of whom invited the speaker. The audience consists of professors, postdocs and Ph.D. students interested in theoretical high-energy physics. Most of them are working on topics related to string theory, unification or applications to cosmology and particle phenomenology. Every Wednesday there are two seminars, one at 10:30 and the other at 13:00. Each seminar lasts approximately one hour.

Please give us a title for your talk and an abstract. You might also give us some links to related papers, which we can put on the page with our seminar announcements (see this page for examples). Please send this information to the local organiser responsible for your visit .

(The text below was written after an enquiry of the participants to the seminar series, in April 2008.)

Accessibility of the talks and background

Since we put together three different groups, the audience is rather large but also rather heterogeneous. For this reason, we would like to ask you if you could please make sure that your talk is understandable to an audience with mixed background, i.e. to people working in different branches of string-theory related topics. It would be nice if you could start by giving enough background material. This should be slow and accessible to everyone. It does not matter whether you use blackboard or computer, if the latter is not a tool for speeding up. The aim should certainly be that the first part (could be e.g. 1/3 or 1/2 according to what you need) explains to a diverse audience the background in which your subject is important. Do not overestimate the knowledge of the audience, and consider whether you should define some concepts, terminology or symbols that appear in your presentation.

Thanks to this longer introduction, we will then be able to enjoy the second part of the seminar, dedicated to your recent work. It might happen that, due to many questions or discussion, you would not arrive in one hour at the end of the seminar that you had planned. However, this is less important for us than that you reach a broader group with your seminar, and you may further discuss with the related experts in private.

Technical aspects

In general we would like you to put more emphasis on the general ideas than on detailed results. However, technicalities can also be an important part of your talk. In this case, please explain the technical tools and motivate them clearly. Avoid slides with just formulas that are difficult to grasp for non-experts.

Thanks for your efforts in the preparation. We are aware that this takes a lot of your time. We look forward to an interesting day.