g-RIPS-Sendai 2023

June 19 (Mon) - August 8 (Tue), 2023

The Research in Industrial Projects for Students (RIPS) program has been held at the Institute for Pure & Applied Mathematics (IPAM) of the University of California, Los Angeles. In 2018, the Advanced Institute for Materials Research (AIMR) at Tohoku University in Sendai launched the g-RIPS-Sendai program in collaboration with IPAM, targeting graduate-level students in mathematical science and related disciplines. Participants from the U.S. and Japan will work on cross-cultural teams on research projects designed by industrial partners. The projects are expected to be of great interest to the partners and offer stimulating challenges to students. For more information on this year's g-RIPS-Sendai 2023, please visit the program website at the related link. Organizers: Research Alliance Center for Mathematical Science (RACMaS), Tohoku University Tohoku Forum for Creativity (TFC), Tohoku University Advanced Institute for Materials Research (AIMR), Tohoku University In cooperation with the following organizations: RIKEN Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences Program (iTHEMS) Institute for Pure & Applied Mathematics (IPAM), UCLA

Venue: Advanced Institute for Materials Research (AIMR), Tohoku University

iTHEMS Science Outreach Workshop 2023

June 16 (Fri) - 18 (Sun), 2023

This year's meeting on "Outreach of RIKEN iTHEMS 2023@Sendai&Zoom" will be held from FRI June 16 to SUN June 18, as a face-to-face meeting at TOKYO ELECTRON House of Creativity of Tohoku Forum for Creativity in cooperation with iTHEMS SUURI-COOL (Sendai) using ZOOM for the necessary part as well.

Venue: TOKYO ELECTRON House of Creativity, Katahira Campus, Tohoku University / via Zoom

Event Official Language: Japanese

A Spin on Wave Dark Matter

June 15 (Thu) at 16:00 - 17:30, 2023

Mustafa Amin (Associate Professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rice University, USA)

What can we learn about the intrinsic spin of ultralight dark matter field from astrophysical observations? That is, is dark matter is a scalar (spin 0), (spin 1) or tensor (spin 2) field? Using analytic calculations and 3+1 dimensional simulations, I will argue that the imprint of spin can be seen via (i) the initial density power spectrum, (ii) interference patterns in the density field inside dark matter halos, and through (iii) (polarized) solitons with macroscopic intrinsic spin. Based on features in the initial power spectrum, I will provide a bound on the dark matter mass > 10^(-18) eV for post-inflationary production. With increasing intrinsic spin, interference patterns in halos are reduced (and the inner shapes of halos modified) — which can be probed by lensing and dynamical heating of stars. Finally, after introducing polarized solitons, I will show that the time-scale of emergence of solitons (within halos) increases with increasing spin, and briefly discuss electromagnetic and gravitational wave signatures from such polarized solitons. Time-permitting, I will also mention connections to “spinor" Bose-Einstein condensates in the laboratory.

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

Event Official Language: English

Phase reduction beyond the Kuramoto model

June 15 (Thu) at 14:00 - 15:00, 2023

Iván León (Research Scientist, Department of Systems and Control Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology)

Many biological, engineering and natural systems can be modeled as populations of coupled oscillators where each oscillator behaves periodically. When these units are coupled to each other, emergent phenomena, as synchronization, appears. However, dealing with those systems is usually difficult due to the large number of degrees of freedom. Conditionality reduction techniques to obtain simple tractable models are usually considered. The most common method is "phase reduction" that allows to capture the dynamics of each oscillator with just one variable, the phase. The succeed of the method was clear when the Kuramoto model, derived through phase reduction, gave a simple explanation to collective synchronization. Despite this success, phase reduction is often limited to the Kuramoto model because of the challenge to obtain analytical expressions. The porpoise of this talk is to make clear that phase reduction beyond Kuramoto model is possible. On the first part of the talk we introduce phase reduction and its limitations. Then we show how it is possible to obtain analytical phase reduced model for weakly nonlinear oscillators. Finally, we talk about second order phase reduction where higher order corrections are included to capture the qualitative dynamics and improve accuracy.

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

Event Official Language: English

Quantum skyrmion lattices in Heisenberg ferromagnets

June 8 (Thu) at 17:00 - 18:15, 2023

Andreas Haller (Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Physics and Materials Science, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg)

Skyrmions are topological magnetic textures that can arise in noncentrosymmetric ferromagnetic materials. In most systems experimentally investigated to date, skyrmions emerge as classical objects. However, the discovery of skyrmions with nanometer length scales has sparked interest in their quantum properties. In this talk, I present our (numeric) results on the ground states of unfrustrated two-dimensional spin-1/2 Heisenberg lattices with Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions, where we discovered a broad region in the zero-temperature phase diagram which hosts quantum skyrmion lattices. The simulations are based on an established variational optimization algorithm for matrix product states called density matrix renormalization group, which can faithfully approximate the ground states of small 2D clusters well beyond system sizes amenable for exact diagonalization. We argue that the quantum skyrmion lattice phase can be detected experimentally in the magnetization profile via local magnetic polarization measurements as well as in the spin structure factor via neutron scattering experiments. Deep in the skyrmion ordered phase, we find that the quantum skyrmion lattice state is only weakly entangled with ‘domain wall' entanglement between quasiparticles and environment localized near the boundary spins of the skyrmion. In this ordered regime of weakly entangled entities, large clusters of O(1000) sites can be simulated with great efficiency. Field: condensed matter physics Keywords: quantum spin systems, topology, density matrix renormalization group

Venue: via Zoom

Event Official Language: English

Deciphering speciation processes: a mathematical modelling approach to biodiversity patterns

June 8 (Thu) at 10:00 - 11:00, 2023

Ryo Yamaguchi (Assistant Professor, Department of Advanced Transdisciplinary Sciences, Faculty of Advanced Life Science, Hokkaido University / Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Biodiversity Research Centre, University of British Columbia, Canada)

The grandeur and complexity of Earth’s biodiversity present a challenge to comprehend the intricate mechanisms underlying speciation. Once dubbed by Darwin as the “mystery of mysteries,” speciation remains a frontier in biology, with much still cloaked in obscurity. Applying mathematical models inspired by population genetics and individual-based simulations, I aim to shed light on the complex mechanisms underlying speciation. In this talk, I focus on the concept of a “speciation cycle,” a recurring pattern integral to the formation of biodiversity. In contrast to traditional views that focus solely on a single speciation event, our approach argues for the necessity of multiple intertwined processes. These include the coexistence of closely related species, ongoing diversification, and the accumulation of new species, all while avoiding extinction. By overviewing mathematical models of each evolutionary and ecological process, I will introduce their basic ideas, and examine under what conditions the formation and coexistence of new species are promoted. Then we further explore the temporal and spatial dimensions of speciation, looking closely at the intervals between speciation events and the steady buildup of biodiversity over geological timescales. By bridging the gap between microevolutionary processes and macroevolutionary patterns, I hope to enable the prediction of biodiversity patterns based on a deeper understanding of speciation mechanisms.

Venue: via Zoom

Event Official Language: English

Around homogeneous spaces of complex semisimple quantum groups

June 7 (Wed) at 14:00 - 16:30, 2023

Kan Kitamura (Ph.D. Student, Graduate School of Mathematical Sciences, The University of Tokyo)

Murray and von Neumann initiated the study of operator algebras motivated by the mathematical foundations of quantum physics. Operator algebras give good language to treat quantum symmetries, such as quantum groups. In this talk, I would like to give an overview of this topic first. Then, I discuss the q-deformations of complex semisimple Lie groups. From an operator algebraic viewpoint, we can treat them as "locally compact" quantum groups. Especially, I will focus on its homogenous spaces coming from discrete quantum subgroups with a motivation toward the quantum analog of lattices. Unlike the classical setting, we can obtain a complete classification of its discrete quantum subgroups.

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

Event Official Language: English

Termination of Superradiance from a Binary Companion

June 6 (Tue) at 13:30 - 15:00, 2023

Huiyu Zhu (Ph.D. Student, Department of Physics, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong)

We study the impact of a binary companion on black hole superradiance at orbital frequencies away from the gravitational-collider-physics (GCP) resonance bands. A superradiant state can couple to a strongly absorptive state via the tidal perturbation of the companion, thereby acquiring a suppressed superradiance rate. Below a critical binary separation, this superradiance rate becomes negative, and the boson cloud gets absorbed by the black hole. This critical binary separation leads to tight constraints on GCP. Especially, a companion with mass ratio q > 10^−3 invalidates all GCP fine structure transitions, as well as almost all Bohr transitions except those from the |211> state. Meanwhile, the backreaction on the companion manifests itself as a torque acting on the binary, producing floating/sinking orbits that can be verified via pulsar timing. In addition, the possible termination of cloud growth may help to alleviate the current bounds on the ultralight boson mass from various null detections.

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

Event Official Language: English

Modelling radiation cancer treatment with ordinary and fractional differential equations

June 1 (Thu) at 10:00 - 11:00, 2023

Kathleen Wilkie (Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics, Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada)

Fractional calculus has recently been applied to mathematical modelling of tumour growth, but its use introduces complexities that may not be warranted. Mathematical modelling with differential equations is a standard approach to study and predict treatment outcomes for population-level and patient-specific responses. Here we use patient data of radiation-treated tumours to discuss the benefits and limitations of introducing fractional derivatives into three standard models of tumour growth. The fractional derivative introduces a history-dependence into the growth function, which requires a continuous death-rate term for radiation treatment. This newly proposed radiation-induced death-rate term improves computational efficiency in both ordinary and fractional derivative models. This computational speed-up will benefit common simulation tasks such as model parameterization and the construction and running of virtual clinical trials.

Venue: via Zoom

Event Official Language: English

Quantum uncertainty of fields and its effect on entanglement generation in quantum particles

May 31 (Wed) at 14:00 - 15:15, 2023

Yuki Sugiyama (Ph.D. Student, Department of Physics, Graduate School of Science, Kyushu University)

The unification of gravity and quantum mechanics is one of the important problems. To elucidate the theory of quantum gravity, it is becoming more and more important to get any hint of the quantum nature of gravity. In particular, the quantum-gravity-induced-entanglement of masses (QGEM) scenario, which is expected to observe the quantum nature of non-relativistic gravity, has recently attracted great attention. In this talk, we show the effect of relativistic fields on entanglement generation based on quantum field theory. We also discuss the relationship between the entanglement generation and quantum uncertainty of the fields.

Venue: Seminar Room #359 / via Zoom

Event Official Language: English

Spectral correlations and scrambling dynamics in Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev type models

May 30 (Tue) at 13:30 - 15:00, 2023

Masaki Tezuka (Assistant Professor, Division of Physics and Astronomy, Graduate School of Science, Kyoto University)

Note: Due to unexpected trouble, we have made the decision to postpone the seminar scheduled for February 21 to May 30. Sorry for the trouble. Abstract: The Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model, proposed in 2015, is a quantum mechanical model of N Majorana or complex fermions with all-to-all random four-body interactions. The model has attracted significant attention over the years due to its features such as the existence of the large-N solution with maximally chaotic behavior at low temperatures and holographic correspondence to low-dimensional gravity. The sparse version of the SYK model reproduces essential features of the original model for reduced numbers of disorder parameters. We recently proposed [1] a further simplification, where we set the nonzero couplings to be +1 or -1 rather than sampling from a continuous distribution such as Gaussian. This binary-coupling model exhibits strong correlations in the spectrum, as observed in the spectral form factor, more efficiently in terms of the number of nonzero terms than in the Gaussian distribution case. We also discuss the scrambling dynamics with the binary-coupling sparse SYK model, comparing the model with the original model as well as the SYK model with random two-body terms [2], where the localization of the many-body eigenstates in the Fock space has been quantitatively studied [3,4].

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

Event Official Language: English

Molecular and evolutionary bases of Pieris butterflies for overcoming diverse chemical defenses in their host plants

May 25 (Thu) at 16:00 - 17:00, 2023

Yu Okamura (JSPS Research Fellow PD, Department of Biological Sciences, Graduate School of Science, The University of Tokyo)

In terrestrial ecosystems, plants and herbivorous insects account for more than half of the described species and play quite important ecological roles. Plants and herbivorous insects have strong chemical interaction as plants defend themselves with various defense compounds such as secondary metabolites and herbivores adapt to it by evolving detoxification mechanisms. Larvae of Pieris butterflies feed on Brassicaceae plants as the main host. Brassicaceae plants contain diverse glucosinolates (GLS) as a main chemical defense, which can be rapidly hydrolyzed into toxic isothiocyanates by a plant enzyme called myrosinase upon tissue damage. Larvae of Pieris butterflies are known to express nitrile-specifier protein in their gut and this can redirect toxic breakdown products of GLSs to less toxic metabolites. Although NSP is considered an evolutionary key innovation for Pieridae that enabled these butterflies to colonize GLS-containing plants, it has been largely unclear whether NSP is enough for Pieris butterfly larvae to overcome the diverse types of GLS they encounter in their host plants. In this seminar, I would like to introduce our recent findings showing that Pieris butterfly larvae not only use NSP but also use its ortholog major allergen (MA) to overcome the diverse types of GLS in their Brassicaceae host plants. We found that Pieris larvae show fine-tuned regulation of those two adaptive genes depending on the chemical profiles of their host plants. Furthermore, those two adaptive genes have different evolutionary trajectories in macro- and micro-evolutionary scales among Pieris species or populations associated with their pattern of host plant usage. Moreover, with an approach using CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing, we showed that both NSP and MA have different but complementary roles in disarming GLS-based defenses in their host plants and that both genes are crucial for Pieris in overcoming their host plant’s major chemical defense. Those highlight that having both NSP and MA is a key for Pieris butterflies to overcome the diverse types and GLS and, consequently, adapt to a wider range of Brassicaceae hosts. Our results illuminate that gene duplication, functional differentiation, and the evolution of gene regulation mechanisms are all crucial for herbivorous insects to overcome co-evolving chemical defenses in their host plants.

Venue: via Zoom

Event Official Language: English

Hydrodynamic limit and the fluctuating hydrodynamics for large-scale interacting systems

May 24 (Wed) at 14:00 - 16:30, 2023

Kohei Hayashi (Visiting Researcher, iTHEMS)

In these decades, a great deal of works has been devoted to understand macroscopic phenomena, such as diffusion, aggregation or pattern formation, from the viewpoint of microscopic systems. Hydrodynamic limit, or fluctuating hydrodynamics, is a fundamental framework to explain the macroscopic behavior of physical quantities in mathematically rigorous ways from a system of the vast numbers of microscopic agents under random interactions, which system is called the large-scale interacting system. In this framework, our central aim is to derive partial differential equations (PDEs) which describe time evolution of some macroscopic quantities, starting from the large-scale interacting systems; hydrodynamic limit is a procedure to derive deterministic PDEs with help of the law of large numbers, whereas stochastic PDEs are derived under the scale of the central limit theorem by fluctuating hydrodynamics. In this talk, I would like to explain basic concepts of hydrodynamic limit and fluctuating hydrodynamics, through some simple models. In the first part, I will give a concise exposition on Markov processes as preliminaries and then state some results on scaling limits of simple exclusion processes as a pedagogical example. In the second part, I will talk about recent progress on universality which appears in fluctuating hydrodynamics. Especially, I would like to talk about the universality of the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang equation, and its mathematical background.

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

Event Official Language: English

Statistical methods to probe binary stellar evolution with ZTF and LISA data

May 23 (Tue) at 13:30 - 15:00, 2023

Lucy McNeill (JSPS Fellow, Department of Physics, Division of Physics and Astronomy, Graduate School of Science, Kyoto University)

The Laser-Interferometer-Space-Antenna (LISA) will be capable of detecting all galactic double neutron star binaries (DNSBs) with orbital periods < 20 minutes, as well as 10-100’s of thousands of double white dwarf binaries. I will present our method to use LISA detections to constrain the formation frequencies of galactic DNSBs, which are determined by supernova physics and various mass exchange processes. Next, I summarise the key differences in DNSBs and white dwarf binaries (WDBs) in the context of future LISA observations, as well as the current Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) for the latter. Then we will examine the current catalogue of short period white dwarf binaries (orbital periods < 1 hour) detected by ZTF so far, including the first ever measurement (Burdge et al. 2023) of the temperature of a mass transferring white dwarf in a binary. Here I will make the case that taken together, these observations are in conflict with the theoretical picture commonly used in Galactic modelling- specifically related to cooling and mass transfer leading to WDB mergers. However, heating from tidal interactions may explain and mediate this inconsistency. Finally I will put these results into context regarding preparing for the unprecedented data set of galactic white dwarf binaries from LISA in the 2030s.

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

Event Official Language: English

X-ray study on the synchrotron emission in Kepler's SNR

May 19 (Fri) at 14:00 - 15:15, 2023

Vincenzo Sapienza (Ph.D. Student, Department of Physics, Graduate School of Science, The University of Tokyo)

Synchrotron X-ray emission in young supernova remnants (SNRs) is a powerful diagnostic tool to study the population of high energy electrons accelerated at the shock front. We performed a spatially resolved spectral analysis of the young Kepler's SNR, where we identify two different regimes of particle acceleration. In the north, where the shock interacts with a dense circumstellar medium (CSM), we found a more efficient acceleration than in the south, where the shock velocity is higher and there are no signs of shock interaction with dense CSM. We also studied the temporal evolution of the synchrotron flux, from 2006 to 2014. A number of regions show a steady synchrotron flux and equal cooling and acceleration times. However, we found some regions where we measured a significant decrease in flux from 2006 to 2014. Our results display a coherent picture of the different regimes of electron acceleration observed in Kepler's SNR. Also If I will have time during the seminar it will be nice to present also some preliminary results I will have in the SN 1987A project.

Venue: Seminar Room #359 / via Zoom

Event Official Language: English

Excursion Theory, Galton Watson Trees and their Scaling Limits

May 18 (Thu) at 16:00 - 17:00, 2023

Christy Koji Kelly (Special Postdoctoral Researcher, iTHEMS)

In this talk we aim to introduce a recent perspective in probability theory that views random trees as random excursions with additional data. This perspective is particular suited to the study of the scaling limit of tree-valued random processes. Excursion theory is a useful and relatively elementary tool allowing one to derive rather explicit information about the local and global geometry of the resultant continuum trees which in turn can be used to derive information about large random trees. We illustrate these ideas in the context of the Brownian continuum random tree, the scaling limit of critical Galton-Watson trees and a structure that arises naturally in various contexts in physics; in particular the Brownian continuum random tree is a pathological model of quantum spacetime. Despite the fundamentally mathematical nature of the talk, the aim is to keep the presentation essentially heuristic emphasising key intuitions over rigorous proof. The content itself should be relevant to biologists interested in the theory of branching processes or coalescent theory.

Venue: Seminar Room #359 / via Zoom

Event Official Language: English

Exploring GPT’s Influence on Natural Science and Mathematics

May 17 (Wed) at 10:00 - 15:00, 2023

We are organizing a workshop to explore the application of ChatGPT in natural sciences, with a focus on theoretical physics and mathematics. Advances in GPT-4 and plugin technology are expected to bring about transformative changes in the way research is conducted. We will investigate the potential for another shift in research methodology following the advent of computers. Expert-led lectures on large language models (LLMs/ChatGPT) will also be conducted. We aim to deepen the discussion on the effective utilization of LLMs as tools to support the research of physicists and mathematicians. This workshop will be held in a hybrid format, combining online streaming with in-person presentations, to accommodate a larger number of participants. In addition to the lectures, short talks and discussions will be held entirely offline. The target audience is mainly students and researchers in the natural sciences, but please note that there will be a limit to the number of in-person attendees. The aim of this event is to provide a forum for researchers to engage in earnest discussions. Those who do not align with the objectives of this workshop are kindly asked to refrain from participating. We look forward to this opportunity to consider, together with all of you, new research methods and perspectives in the fields of theoretical physics and mathematics in the natural sciences, utilizing ChatGPT. (The above text was created by modifying the text generated by Chat-GPT and GPT-4.) All talks will be delivered in Japanese.

Venue: #435-437, 4F, Main Research Building (Main Venue) / via Zoom

Event Official Language: Japanese

Ground-state phases of the one-dimensional SU(N)-symmetric Kondo lattice model

May 11 (Thu) at 17:00 - 18:15, 2023

Keisuke Totsuka (Associate Professor, Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics, Kyoto University)

The Kondo-lattice model and its variants (e.g., the Kondo-Heisenberg model), in which itinerant fermions interact with immobile magnetic moments via spin-exchange coupling (Kondo coupling), have been playing an important role in understanding the physics of heavy-fermion systems. In this talk, I begin by quickly explaining how the SU(N) Kondo-lattice model, in which the spin SU(2) symmetry is generalized to SU(N), is realized in actual physical systems (e.g., cold fermions and twisted bilayer graphene), and then I focus on the ground-state properties of its one-dimensional version. Specifically, when the Kondo coupling is sufficiently large, we find ferromagnetic metallic phases that can be established rigorously as well as several insulating ones. I also show that the SU(N) Kondo-lattice model provides a natural condensed-matter realization of supersymmetric [i.e., SU(N|1)] models. Various (insulating) phases at small Kondo coupling are then explored using the machinery of bosonization and various conformal field theory (CFT) techniques, and the results are compared with the predictions of the Lieb-Schultz-Mattis-type (or anomaly-matching) argument. Field: condensed matter physics Keywords: Kondo lattice model, SU(N) symmetry, supersymmetry, heavy-fermion systems, bosonization, conformal field theory

Venue: via Webex

Event Official Language: English

Conditions for maintaining pseudo-overdominance

May 11 (Thu) at 16:00 - 17:00, 2023

Diala Abu Awad (Associate Professor, Génétique Quantitative et Évolution - Le Moulon, Université Paris-Saclay, France)

Deleterious recessive mutations should purge or fix within inbred populations, yet inbred populations often retain moderate to high segregating load. However, arrays of deleterious recessives linked in repulsion could generate appreciable pseudo-overdominance, mimicking overdominant selection that would sustain segregating load. We use analytical approches and simulations to explore whether and for how long pseudo-overdominant (POD) zones can persist once created (e.g., by hybridization between populations fixed for alternative mildly deleterious mutations). Balanced haplotype loads, tight linkage, and moderate to strong cumulative selective effects all serve to maintain POD zones. Tight linkage is key, suggesting that such regions are most likely to arise and persist in low recombination regions (like inversions). Selection and drift unbalance the load, eventually eliminating POD zones, but this process is quite slow, and could influence short term evolution of populations.

Venue: via Zoom

Event Official Language: English

Quantum transport with cold atoms

May 10 (Wed) at 13:30 - 15:00, 2023

Shun Uchino (Researcher, Advanced Science Research Center, Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA))

Quantum transport occurring through a mesoscopic conduction region allows us to extract interesting quantum many-body phenomena. For decades, solid-state systems have been the playground of such transport and revealed nontrivial outcomes such as the conductance quantization in a quantum point contact system and the fractional charge measurement in a fractional quantum Hall system. More recently, cold atoms trapped in the vacuum have served as the complementary system to study the quantum transport phenomena. In this seminar, I wish to discuss the recent progresses of quantum transport with cold atoms. The great advantages of those systems are that one can control quantum statistics, inter-particle interactions, dissipation, and dimensions. I try to show that such controllability enables to explore a regime of quantum transport that has yet to be reached with solid-state materials, including transport of bosons, dissipation effect in transport, and transport with synthetic dimensions.

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

Event Official Language: English