Quantum Computing for Nuclear Physics (QC-NP 2026)

October 13 (Tue) - 16 (Fri) 2026

Join us for a comprehensive workshop on the application of quantum computing to nuclear physics, bringing together experts from around the world to share the latest developments and advancements in this rapidly evolving field. The workshop will cover a broad range of topics, including quantum algorithms, quantum computing hardware, and their applications to lattice field theories, gauge field theories, scattering, nuclear structure, and nuclear astrophysics. The workshop will provide ample opportunities for participants to exchange ideas, share their research, and initiate new collaborations. Through a combination of presentations and interactive discussion sessions, we aim to foster a collaborative environment that drives innovation and advances our understanding of the intersection of quantum computing and nuclear physics. [Workshop Schedule] The workshop will start from the morning of October 13 The banquet will be held on the evening of October 15 [Important Dates] Registration deadline with oral presentation: August 31, 2026 Recommended to register by: August 31, 2026 [Invited Speakers] A. Baha Balantekin (University of Wisconsin Madison) Raul Briceño (University of California Berkeley/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) Philipp Höhn (Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Etsuko Itou (Kyoto University) Dima Kharzeev (Brookhaven National Laboratory/Stony Brook University) Yuta Kikuchi (Quantinuum) Denis Lacroix (IJCLab) Dean Lee (Michigan State University) Mario Motta (IBM Quantum) Takeshi Sato (University of Tokyo) Ionel Stetcu (Los Alamos National Laboratory) Paul Stevenson (University of Surrey) Nathan Wiebe (University of Toronto) Seiji Yunoki (RIKEN) [Organizers] Ermal Rrapaj (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory/RIKEN, Chair) Carlo Barbieri (University of Milan) Tetsuo Hatsuda (RIKEN) Masaaki Kimura (RIKEN/University of Tokyo) Haozhao Liang (University of Tokyo) Tomoya Naito (University of Tokyo/RIKEN) Enrico Prati (University of Milan) Alessandro Roggero (University of Trento) Takeshi Sato (University of Tokyo)

Venue: Faculty of Science Bldg.1, School of Science, The University of Tokyo, Hongo Campus

Event Official Language: English

Majorana Modes: Fundamentals, Status & Directions

October 13 (Tue) - 16 (Fri) 2026

Workshop Overview Majorana modes lie at the heart of contemporary condensed-matter physics, exhibiting non-Abelian exchange statistics; when protected by topology, they are robust against environmental perturbations. Here, “Majorana mode” is used broadly to include a localized zero-energy Majorana state (a Majorana zero mode) and chiral Majorana edge states with gapless dispersion crossing zero energy. This three-day in-person workshop returns to fundamentals and open questions. It opens with a tutorial session on the afternoon of October 13 for non-experts and adjacent fields, and emphasizes rigorous theory–experiment dialogue, robust methodology, and concrete benchmarks for realizing and testing Majorana modes. Participants Experimentalists and theorists working on Majorana modes Researchers in adjacent fields (quantum materials, superconductivity, mesoscopic physics) Graduate students and postdocs interested in entering the field Topics include (non-exhaustive) Majorana zero modes in a variety of nanostructures Chiral Majorana edge states in quantum spin liquids and other platforms Disorder, interactions, and realistic device modeling Experimental diagnostics and “smoking gun” signatures Topological Quantum Spin Systems

Venue: Okochi Hall

Event Official Language: English

AI and Scientific Discovery

October 19 (Mon) 13:00 - 14:00, 2026

Joseph Ledsam (Google Health Lead, Japan, Google Japan)

Artificial intelligence is having a transformative impact on health and scientific discovery. This presentation will trace the evolution from foundational breakthroughs to the sophisticated capabilities of today's large-scale AI models. It will explore how these advanced systems are creating new possibilities across the healthcare landscape, from accelerating therapeutic development to enhancing diagnostic processes and interpreting complex medical data. The session will also take a deeper look at the future possibilities for AI in health and explore the emerging role of agentic AI in scientific discovery. The core theme is the responsible development of AI to create tools that assist scientists, support healthcare professionals, and empower users. Bio: Dr Joseph Ledsam leads Google Health in Japan, where he works across AI research, digital health and health in Google products. He has led research in medical AI, genomics and drug discovery published in journals including Nature, Nature Medicine and Nature Methods. Before moving to Japan he worked as a medical doctor in the UK, and founded the Health Research and Genomics teams in Google DeepMind. He obtained his medical degree from The University of Leeds, UK, and was a research fellow at University College London during his clinical residency.

Venue: #435-437, Main Research Building (Main Venue) / via Zoom

Event Official Language: English

Mini-Workshop: Quantum Frontiers — From Molecules to Quarks and the EIC

October 20 (Tue) 9:45 - 17:00, 2026

== Mini-workshop Program == 9:45 - 10:15 Erik Loetstedt (RIKEN) Rovibrational energy levels of molecules by quantum computing 10:15 - 10:45 Ryusuke Hamazaki (RIKEN) Quantum many-body Mpemba effect through resonances 10:45 - 11:15 Yang-yang Tan (U. Tokyo) Generative Modeling of Stochastic Dynamics for Long-Time Evolution 11:15 - 11:45 Yan Lyu (RIKEN) Charmonia scattering from lattice QCD 11:45 - 13:00 Lunch 13:00 - 13:30 Arata Yamamoto (RIKEN) Quantum anomaly for benchmarking quantum computing 13:30 - 14:00 Tianyin Li (RIKEN) Efficient Quantum Simulations of Yang-Mills theory with Maximal-tree Gauge 14:00 - 14:30 Yahui Chai (RIKEN) Probing Resonances through Real-Time Particle Scattering 14:30 - 15:00 Ermal Rrapaj (LBL) Quantum Simulations of Two-Dimensional Non-Abelian Adjoint String Breaking 15:00 - 15:30 Coffee Break 15:30 - 17:00 Dima Kharzeev (U. Connecticut) Quantum Simulations of Entanglement in Jet Production and Structure Functions at the EIC

Venue: Seminar Room #359, Seminar Room #359 (Main Venue) / via Zoom

Event Official Language: English

Quantum Simulations of Entanglement in Jet Production and Structure Functions at the EIC

October 20 (Tue) 15:30 - 17:00, 2026

Dima Kharzeev (Professor, Department of Physics, University of Connecticut, USA)

The Electron–Ion Collider (EIC) offers an opportunity to explore the quantum structure of hadronic matter and the role of entanglement in high-energy scattering. I will present our results on quantum simulations of entanglement in jet production and structure functions, highlighting how quantum computing can help investigate correlations in partonic dynamics. I will discuss the physical insights emerging from these simulations and their implications for connecting quantum information concepts with observables at the EIC.

Venue: Seminar Room #359 (Main Venue) / via Zoom

Event Official Language: English

Data assimilation with the full covariance on a fault-tolerant quantum computer

October 21 (Wed) 15:00 - 16:30, 2026

Takemasa Miyoshi (Team Principal, Data Assimilation Research Team, RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS))

Data assimilation (DA) is the core of numerical weather prediction, estimating an accurate state of the weather model by combining forecast and observations. DA provides a general approach and is being applied to various problems beyond weather. The state estimation is a linear solve where the background error covariance B is essential. Since B is an N × N matrix with N ~ 10^8 to 10^9 for the weather model, the full B has never been used. For decades the community has approximated B by parameterized covariance models or by low-rank ensembles with localization and thereby discards genuine structures that we know exist from large-ensemble experiments. Fault-tolerant quantum computing (FTQC) could remove this constraint, since quantum linear system solvers scale polylogarithmically in N. However, the DA equations cannot be applied naively: the observation-space form squares the block-encoding normalization factor for observations with wide footprints, and the state-space form contains B^{-1}, whose condition number ~10^8. This talk presents a combined state-observation formulation that avoids both difficulties: it contains no B^{-1}, and its condition number is governed by the observation error covariance R rather than by B. Numerical experiments with the Lorenz-96 model reproduce the exact solution with the full B and outperform localized ensemble Kalman filters. The formulation assumes that B and the observation operator are provided as block-encoded oracles, and how to construct such oracles without ever storing the matrices is the open problem. A first concrete target is an end-to-end demonstration with Lorenz-96 on a quantum simulator with only seven data qubits, which I would like to discuss with the iTHEMS community.

Venue: Seminar Room #359 (Main Venue) / via Zoom

Event Official Language: English

Observability-based causal inference in linear stochastic systems with hidden inputs

October 22 (Thu) 13:00 - 14:00, 2026

Daiki Sekizawa (Special Postdoctoral Researcher, Laboratory for Neural Computation and Adaptation, RIKEN Center for Brain Science (CBS))

Causal inference from neural time series is confounded by correlations induced by hidden common inputs, a problem that is especially acute because the full set of variables shaping neural activity is rarely accessible. Prediction based measures such as Granger causality can therefore falsely attribute such dependencies to causal influence. Delay coordinate reconstruction, which is also closely connected to observability in control theory, provides a complementary route: in deterministic systems, downstream delays can reconstruct upstream causes, whereas the reverse does not generally hold. This asymmetry provides a signature of causal direction, as exploited by convergent cross mapping. In stochastic dynamics, however, dynamical and observation noise enter delay coordinates and prevent exact trajectory reconstruction. Here, we develop data driven criteria that extend this observability principle to partially observed stochastic systems. First, we show that observability can be tested by regression of time lagged covariance matrices, which removes direct noise contributions while preserving the observability relation. Second, we show that causal direction can be tested through inclusion of stochastic Koopman eigenvalues estimated from upstream and downstream delay coordinates, because downstream observations generically contain the dynamical components observable upstream. Numerical examples show that the proposed criteria recover causal direction and reject spurious dependencies induced by unobserved common inputs, including cases in which Granger causality and convergent cross mapping fail to distinguish common input from causal influence. Although motivated by neural recordings, the framework applies broadly to partially observed stochastic dynamical systems beyond neuroscience.

Venue: Hybrid Format (3F #359 and Zoom), Main Research Building / via Zoom

Event Official Language: English

Born-Oppenheimer EFT: an unified description of ordinary and exotic quarkonia

October 27 (Tue) 13:30 - 15:00, 2026

Nora Brambilla (Professor, TUM School of Natural Sciences, Technical University of Munich, Germany)

We show how the Born--Oppenheimer effective field theory (BOEFT) provides a unified description of ordinary and exotic quarkonia grounded on the non-relativistic expansions of QCD and supplemented with lattice QCD inputs. We show applications of the BOEFT to tetraquarks, pentaquarks, quarkonium hybrids and on threshold effects in the quarkonium spectrum. We present the insights that BOEFT delivers us on the mature of these XYZ exotics states.

Venue: via Zoom

Event Official Language: English

Exploring Noisy Quantum Thermodynamical Processes via the Depolarizing-Channel Approximation

October 28 (Wed) 16:00 - 17:00, 2026

Jian Li (Ph.D. Student, Center for Theoretical Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland)

Noise and errors are unavoidable in any realistic quantum process, including processes designed to reduce noise and errors in the first place. In particular, quantum thermodynamical protocols for cooling can be significantly affected, potentially altering both their performance and efficiency. Analytically characterizing the impact of such errors becomes increasingly challenging as the system size grows, particularly in deep quantum circuits where noise can accumulate in complex ways. To address this, we introduce a general framework for approximating the cumulative effect of gate-dependent noise using a global depolarizing channel. We specify the regime in which this approximation provides a reliable description of the noisy dynamics. Applying our framework to the thermodynamical two-sort algorithmic cooling (TSAC) protocol, we analytically derive its asymptotic cooling limit in the presence of noise. Using the cooling limit, the optimal cooling performance is achieved by a finite number of qubits --- distinguished from the conventional noiseless TSAC protocol by an infinite number of qubits --- and fundamental bounds on the achievable ground-state population are derived. This approach opens new avenues for exploring noisy quantum thermodynamical processes.

Venue: via Zoom

Event Official Language: English

Maximal Enhancements in Eight-Dimensional Non-Supersymmetric Heterotic Strings

October 30 (Fri) 10:30 - 12:00, 2026

Yuefeng Liu (Academic Researcher, Institute for Advanced Study,, Kyushu University)

We classify maximally enhanced, rank-preserving non-supersymmetric heterotic strings in eight dimensions by studying orbifolds of supersymmetric heterotic strings on T^2.We first review the construction in nine dimensions, where it reproduces the 95 maximally semisimple enhancement points obtained from previous extended-Dynkin analyses. We then start from the maximally enhanced supersymmetric Narain points in eight dimensions and use Kac's theorem to enumerate candidate order-two inner actions, retaining only those that lift to consistent Narain-lattice shifts. This gives 1210 maximal enhancement points, of which 71 are tachyon-free, and 25 have neither tachyons nor shifted-sector massless scalars. For each entry we determine the gauge algebra and the low-lying scalar and fermion spectra, and for the tachyon-free cases we evaluate the one-loop cosmological constant. For the 25 subcases without shifted-sector massless scalars, we further compute the Hessian of the one-loop potential and test the refined de Sitter swampland conjecture.

Venue: Seminar Room #359, Seminar Room #359 (Main Venue) / via Zoom

Event Official Language: English

Quantum Creation of the Universe: Reassessing the No-Boundary and Tunneling Proposals

October 30 (Fri) 14:00 - 15:00, 2026

Hiroki Matsui (Researcher, Osaka Central Advanced Mathematical Institute, Osaka Metropolitan University)

How was our Universe created? This is one of the most fundamental questions in cosmology. Quantum cosmology attempts to answer it by using a "wave function of the Universe," and for four decades the discussion has been dominated by two proposals: the no-boundary proposal of Hartle and Hawking, and the tunneling proposal of Vilenkin. The two predict very different initial states for our Universe, yet for a long time there was no common framework in which they could be exactly analyzed and compared. In this talk I will begin with a pedagogical introduction to the wave function of the Universe and to the Lorentzian path integral formulation based on Picard-Lefschetz theory, which makes the gravitational path integral well defined without the ambiguities of the traditional Euclidean approach and allows both proposals to be treated on the same footing. I will then present our recent results. Using Lefschetz-thimble analysis together with resurgence theory, we resolve the Stokes-line ambiguity that had obscured earlier analyses and show that the path integral uniquely yields the tunneling wave function rather than the no-boundary one. The no-boundary saddles nevertheless leave a trace: their contributions exactly cancel the Borel ambiguity of the perturbative quantum-gravity corrections around the tunneling saddle, demonstrating that resurgence is at work in quantum cosmology. I will also discuss what changes beyond general relativity, using Hořava-Lifshitz gravity as a concrete UV-complete example.

Venue: Hybrid Format (3F #359 and Zoom), Main Research Building / via Zoom

Event Official Language: English

Mathematical Application Research Team Meeting #20

October 30 (Fri) 15:30 - 16:45, 2026

Yuya Kodama (Assistant Professor, Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Kagoshima University)

Mathematical Application Research Team is delighted to welcome Prof. Kodama Yuya from Kagoshima University for an upcoming team meeting. We warmly invite everyone to join us to hear his talk. Title: Thompson's groups and knot theory Abstract: Thompson’s groups were introduced by Richard Thompson in the 1960s. They first appeared in mathematical logic, but they have since been studied in many other areas of mathematics. For example, they were rediscovered in homotopy theory, and some researchers have tried to use them in cryptography. In 2014, Vaughan Jones found an interesting connection between Thompson’s groups and knot theory. In this talk, I will first introduce Thompson’s groups and some of their connections with other areas. I will then explain the basic idea of Jones’s theory. If time permits, I will also mention my joint work with Takano of Osaka University.

Venue: via Zoom / #359, 3F, Seminar Room #359

Event Official Language: English

Scaling regimes of the 1D Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation

November 5 (Thu) 17:00 - 18:30, 2026

Liubov Gosteva (Ph.D. Student, LPMMC, Université Grenoble Alpes, France)

The Kuramoto-Sivashinsky (KS) equation describes various phenomena exhibiting chaos and instabilities, including flames, reaction-diffusion processes, and thin liquid film flows. It resembles the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) equation, with the key difference being the negative "viscosity" in the KS equation. The KS equation is known to belong to the KPZ universality class: at large scales, its statistical properties are governed by the KPZ fixed point, characterized by the dynamical exponent $z=3/2$ and a known PDF of fluctuations. In this talk, I will analyze the stochastic KS equation using the functional renormalization group (FRG). In this framework, attractive fixed points of the FRG equation determine large-scale universal behavior, while unstable fixed points govern small-scale universal behavior. I will show that the two-point correlation function exhibits, besides the KPZ scaling at large scale, another universal scaling regime at small scale, with $z=1$. This scaling is very robust as it is intrinsic to the KS dynamics. It arises from the vanishing of the effective viscosity when evolving from its microscopic negative KS value, to its macroscopic effective positive KPZ value. I will also present results from direct numerical simulations, which confirm these findings.

Venue: via Zoom

Event Official Language: English

Holography and Observables in Quantum Gravity

November 9 (Mon) - 13 (Fri) 2026

Keiichiro Furuya (Project Researcher, Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU), The University of Tokyo)
Moshe Rozali (Professor, The University of British Columbia, Canada)
Tadashi Takayanagi (Professor, Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics, Kyoto University)
Mengyang Zhang (Project Researcher, Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU), The University of Tokyo)
Martin Sasieta (Postdoctoral Researcher, University of California, Berkeley, USA)
Pawel Caputa (Professor, Stockholm University, Sweden)

In the past 20 years, there has been significant progress in our understanding of quantum gravity based on AdS/CFT. Recently, study of quantum gravity beyond AdS/CFT attracts a lot of attention, where there is no longer an asymptotically AdS boundary on which we can perform measurements with infinite accuracy. Thus it is important to understand observables in gravitational spacetimes with no asymptotic AdS boundaries, what an observer experiences and measures in such a spacetime,  and what is the microscopic theory that describes them.  This workshop aims to gather researchers in the this subject to exchange cutting edge ideas, aiming to establish new research directions and collaborations.

Venue: via Zoom / Okochi Hall / Thursday only, Suzuki Umetaro Hall

Event Official Language: English

Good Enough Computing in Science

November 10 (Tue) 10:00 - 15:00, 2026

Igors Dubanevics (Ph.D. Student, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST))

Venue: #359, 3F, Seminar Room #359

Event Official Language: English

A non-negative matrix factorization-based approach to integrating multimodal omics data with automatically tuned hyperparameters

November 16 (Mon) 14:00 - 15:00, 2026

Dorothy Ellis (Postdoctoral Researcher, Laboratory for Integrative Genomics, RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Sciences (IMS))

Venue: via Zoom

Event Official Language: English

Quantum Simulation of Non-Equilibrium Dynamics in SU(2) and SU(3) Lattice Gauge Theories

November 24 (Tue) 15:00 - 16:30, 2026

Xiaojun Yao (Research Assistant Professor, University of Washington, USA)

Venue: Seminar Room #359 (Main Venue) / via Zoom

Event Official Language: English

KEK(-iTHEMS) Theory Workshop 2026

November 25 (Wed) - 27 (Fri) 2026

Hirotaka Hayashi (Professor, Department of Physics, School of Science, Tokai University)
Hikaru Kawai (Visiting Professor, Nambu Yoichiro Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics (NITEP), Osaka Metropolitan University)
Takato Mori (Assistant Professor, Department of Physics, Faculty of Science, Rikkyo University)
Masaya Nakagawa (Assistant Professor, Department of Physics, Graduate School of Science, The University of Tokyo)
Masaki Shigemori (Professor, Department of Physics, Graduate School of Science, Nagoya University)
Tadashi Takayanagi (Professor, Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics, Kyoto University)
Norihiro Tanahashi (Program-Specific Associate Professor, Department of physics, Graduate School of Science, Kyoto University)
Tatsuya Yamaoka (Ph.D. Student, Department of Physics, Graduate School of Science, The University of Osaka)

The KEK Theory Workshop is an annual workshop on string theory and quantum field theory. Since 2014, it has been held every winter as an international workshop and has become one of the major annual events in the high-energy physics community in Japan. This year’s workshop will be held on site at the KEK Tsukuba Campus from November 25 to 27, and it will be jointly organized with RIKEN iTHEMS. The workshop this year aims to provide a forum for extensive discussions on recent developments in string theory, matrix models, gauge/gravity duality, black-hole microstates, lattice constructions of chiral gauge theories, and open quantum systems.

Venue: Seminar Hall, Building 3, KEK Tsukuba Campus

Event Official Language: English

Rare k-mers reveal centromere haplogroups underlying human diversity and cancer translocation

November 26 (Thu) 13:00 - 14:00, 2026

Yuichi Shiraishi (Chief, Division of Genome Analysis Platform Development, National Cancer Center Japan)

Centromeres are highly variable and rapidly evolving regions of the human genome, and are frequently implicated in various cancers. Human centromeres consist of highly repetitive DNA sequences known as α-satellite higher-order repeats (HORs), which makes their analysis using conventional genome sequencing approaches extremely challenging. Although long-read sequencing technologies now enable near-complete sequencing of centromeres, applying these methods to large numbers of samples remains difficult. As a result, our understanding of centromere diversity across populations and its role in chromosomal rearrangements in cancer has remained limited. In this study, by focusing on rare k-mer markers, we demonstrate that α-satellite HOR haplotypes cluster into genetically related haplogroups. We further developed a software tool, ascairn, to accurately infer these haplogroups from common short-read whole-genome sequencing (WGS) data. Applying our approach to a dataset of more than 3,300 human samples revealed extensive centromere diversity and geographic variation. We also applied the rare k-mer–based approach to centromere sequences from 104 Japanese individuals generated as part of the Japanese Pangenome Project. This analysis revealed characteristic patterns of centromere evolution in the Japanese population and provided new insights into Japanese-specific centromere variation. In addition, we used this method to investigate class-defining chromosomal translocations, specifically der(1;19), also known as 1p/19q co-deletion, in oligodendrogliomas. By analyzing 142 samples from TCGA, we hypothesized that the breakpoints occurred on the p-arm side of D1Z7 and the q-arm side of D19Z3. This hypothesis was subsequently validated through extensive long-read sequencing in two cases, indicating that der(1;19) results in a dicentric chromosome containing two functional centromeres. We also observed that chromosomal rearrangements preferentially occurred in haplotypes with longer repetitive arrays on either the q-arm or p-arm side of the centromere. Furthermore, we identified specific centromere haplogroups associated with either increased or decreased likelihoods of der(1;19) translocations. Our findings show that rare k-mer analysis is a powerful approach for investigating centromere complexity and clarifying the mechanisms underlying centromere-associated abnormalities in cancer.

Venue: via Zoom / Seminar Room #359

Event Official Language: English

Hamiltonian simulation: Standard algorithms and recent developments

December 17 (Thu) 10:30 - 17:00, 2026

Kaoru Mizuta (Associate Professor, Center for Quantum Information and Quantum Biology, The University of Osaka)

This is a lecture-style seminar of quantum computation. The tentative schedule consists of three slots: 10:30-12:00, 13:30-15:00, and 15:30-17:00. Due to equipment limitations, the blackboard might not be visible on Zoom, so we recommend attending in person.

Venue: Seminar Room #359 (Main Venue) / via Zoom

Event Official Language: English

Optimal transport: Thermodynamics, biological information processing and generative models

January 18 (Mon) 13:30 - 15:00, 2027

Sosuke Ito (Associate Professor, Graduate School of Science, The University of Tokyo)

This is a joint seminar co-hosted by Institute for Physics of Intelligence (iπ), UTokyo, and the Venue is #1042,10F of Science Bldg.1 Optimal transport theory is a useful theoretical framework for geometrically characterizing the distance between probability distributions. It is not only used in recent research on generative models but has also been applied to detect information-processing capabilities in biological systems from a statistical perspective, and to discuss thermodynamic efficiency. In this seminar, I will begin with an introduction to optimal transport theory, and also discuss our research on its various applications. More specifically, I will discuss the following topics: 1) The problem of minimizing entropy production within a finite time and its experimental testing. 2) The application of optimal transport to the training of generative models, specifically diffusion models, and their optimal protocols. 3) Quantifying information processing performance using optimal transport in biological signal transduction.

Venue: Faculty of Science Bldg.1, School of Science, The University of Tokyo, Hongo Campus (Main Venue) / via Zoom

Event Official Language: English

iTHEMS NOW & NEXT 2027

July 13 (Tue) - 15 (Thu) 2027

We will hold our annual gathering, **“iTHEMS NOW & NEXT 2027,” from July 13 to 15, 2027**. iTHEMS NOW & NEXT has traditionally been a two-day in-house event, providing an important opportunity for all iTHEMS members, including visiting researchers and new members, to gain a comprehensive overview of current activities across iTHEMS, to learn about research beyond their own fields, and to discuss where iTHEMS should go next. In 2027, we will **expand NOW & NEXT from two to three days** and, for the first time, invite leading researchers from outside iTHEMS across a broad range of research fields. While the first two days will retain the main character of our traditional in-house gathering, the extended three-day format is intended to create a broader opportunity for scientific exchange and, in particular, to enable leading researchers from outside iTHEMS to become better acquainted with our research activities and with the researchers who make up the iTHEMS community. As in previous years, the program will present activities across iTHEMS, including those of its divisions, research teams, working groups, and study groups, together with research presentations and poster sessions by iTHEMS members. Particular emphasis will be placed on communication across disciplinary and organizational boundaries and on identifying emerging research directions and opportunities for new collaborations. The additional third day will build on the presentations and discussions of the preceding two days and provide an opportunity for invited researchers to gain a deeper understanding of the breadth and strengths of research at iTHEMS and to interact directly with our members. We hope that these exchanges will not only introduce iTHEMS and its researchers more widely to leading scientists in different fields, but also bring new perspectives to our community and open possibilities for future scientific interactions and collaborations. Through this expanded three-day NOW & NEXT 2027, we hope to share where iTHEMS is now and where it is heading next, both within our own community and with leading researchers from outside iTHEMS, and to explore together new possibilities for the future development of iTHEMS.

Venue: 2F Large Conference Room, Administrative Headquarters, RIKEN Wako Campus (Main Venue) / via Zoom

Event Official Language: English