Seminar

The math that shows a perfect democracy is impossible

April 23 (Thu) 10:30 - 11:30, 2026

Brian Andrew Mintz (Postdoctoral Researcher, Mathematical Social Science Team, Division of Applied Mathematical Science, RIKEN Center for Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences (iTHEMS))

Groups need to make decisions, and there are a wide variety of ways this can be done, each maximizing different notions of fairness. Social Choice Theory provides a mathematical framework to investigate these possibilities rigorously. Infamous for its many impossibility results, this topic reveals some fundamental limits to democracy. Beyond this, we'll discuss potential resolutions to these problems, as well as their real world implications.

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

Event Official Language: English

Seeing Photons, from Einstein to Bohr to Hanbury Brown-Twiss and related Hong-Ou-Mandel Interference Phenomena

April 22 (Wed) 15:00 - 16:30, 2026

Gordon Baym (Professor Emeritus, University of Illinois, USA)

Why do we believe that the electromagnetic field is quantized, and photons exist? This talk will focus on two ways that the quantization of the electromagnetic field manifests itself in interference experiments. Bohr, who initially doubted photons after Einstein's initial proposal of the photon to explain the photoeffect, eventually proposed a thought experiment showing that the consistency of elementary quantum mechanics at the level of two slit diffraction requires the quantization of the electromagnetic field. In addition, as I will argue, both Hanbury Brown-Twiss interferometry and the closely related Hong-Ou-Mandel effect provide yet another way to see that the electromagnetic field must be quantized.

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

Event Official Language: English

Quantum Computing of Molecular Properties for Fundamental Physics

April 21 (Tue) 16:30 - 18:00, 2026

Pradyot Pritam Sahoo (Graduate International Research Student, Graduate School of Science, The University of Tokyo)

This is the self-introduction talk by Pradyot Pritam Sahoo. Pradyot is a Student Trainee in iTHEMS.

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

Event Official Language: English

Quantum generative learning via diffusion

April 21 (Tue) 10:00 - 11:00, 2026

Zhang Bingzhi (PostDoc, University of Southern California, USA)

Deep generative models are key-enabling technology to computer vision, text generation, and large language models. Generative models for quantum data offer a promising route toward learning and preparing complex quantum-state ensembles. In this talk, I will introduce the quantum denoising diffusion probabilistic model (QuDDPM) [1], which adapts the diffusion-model idea to quantum systems through a forward randomization process and a trainable backward denoising dynamics. I will discuss how this framework enables stepwise learning of target quantum state ensembles and demonstrate its capabilities in various learning tasks. I will then present its extension to mixed states to eliminate the need for scrambling [2]. I will conclude with a brief discussion of recent results on scaling laws of quantum information lifetime in monitored quantum dynamics, emphasizing how mid-circuit measurements can maintain information and provide useful intuition for measurement-assisted quantum machine learning.

Venue: via Zoom

Event Official Language: English

Challenges in virology & neurodegeneration: improving experimental procedures and theoretical insights

April 20 (Mon) 14:00 - 15:00, 2026

Catherine Beauchemin (Deputy Director, RIKEN Center for Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences (iTHEMS))

After repeatedly finding errors in experimental data provided by collaborators, my group developed an online tool (midSIN, https://midsin.roadcake.org/) to improve estimating the concentration of infectious viruses in samples. This led to an unexpected new collaboration with researchers working to measure the concentration of aggregating fibrils in samples from patients suffering from neurodegenerative diseases such as Dementia with Lewy Body and Parkinson's. In the first part of my talk, I will introduce the basics of how infectious virions and aggregating fibril concentrations are measured experimentally, and discuss challenges in tackling these assays' limitations to improve their accuracy and sensitivity. In the second part of my talk, I will discuss the challenges we face in trying to identify the type and minimal number of experimental measurements required to predict the severity and transmission efficacy of diverse influenza viruses collected as part of pandemic surveillance efforts. I hope you will join the talk to learn of these challenges and consider contributing new ideas or approaches to overcome them.

Venue: Hybrid Format (4F #435-437 and Zoom), Main Research Building

Event Official Language: English

Analytical parametrization of the primordial power spectrum in effective Loop Quantum Cosmology

April 20 (Mon) 13:00 - 14:00, 2026

Almudena Sánchez Guillén (Ph.D. Student, Institute of Structure of Matter (IEM-CSIC), Spain)

We investigate the imprints on the angular power spectra of cosmological perturbations of a pre-inflationary bounce phase, as described by the hybrid and dressed metric approaches to loop quantum cosmology. For this purpose, we derive a new parametrization of the primordial power spectrum at the end of the inflationary regime. Apart from slow-roll coefficients and cosmological parameters that are present in the standard cosmological scenario without quantum modifications, this parametrization additionally depends only on pre-inflationary physics. More specifically, we find a dependence on the number of e-folds during the bounce epoch and on a characteristic suppression scale which, given the e-folds accumulated during cosmic evolution, is determined by the energy density at the bounce.

Venue: via Zoom / Seminar Room #359

Event Official Language: English

TJR-iTHEMS Joint Seminar: Golden Age of Neutron Stars

April 17 (Fri) 16:00 - 17:00, 2026

Gordon Baym (Professor Emeritus, University of Illinois, USA)

This is a TJR-iTHEMS Joint Seminar supported by ASPIRE Program ABSTRACT Neutron stars were first posited in the early thirties, and discovered as pulsars in the late sixties; however we are only recently beginning to understand the matter they contain. I will describe the ongoing development of a consistent picture of the liquid interiors of neutron stars, now driven by ever increasing observations as well as theoretical advances. These include observations of heavy neutron stars of about 2.0 solar masses and higher; ongoing inferences of masses and radii by the NICER telescope; and observations of binary neutron star mergers, through gravitational waves as well as across the electromagnetic spectrum. Theoretically an understanding is emerging in QCD of how nuclear matter can turn into deconfined quark matter, which I will illustrate with modern quark-hadron crossover equations of state. BRIEF BIO Gordon Baym is a Professor of Physics at the University of Illinois. Educated at Cornell and Harvard, he spent two years at the Niels Bohr Institute. His interests range from matter under extreme conditions to ultracold atomic physics, astrophysics, and nuclear physics. A pioneer in the study of pulsars and neutron stars, he is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and received the APS Medal for Exceptional Achievement in Research, the Hans Bethe and Lars Onsager Prizes, and the Eugene Feenberg Memorial Medal.

Venue: H701, The University of Osaka, Toyonaka Campus

Event Official Language: English

RIKEN Seminar: Formulation of Life Phenomena from Quantum Theory

April 16 (Thu) 14:00 - 16:05, 2026

13:45 Opening 14:00-14:05 Introduction Atsushi Iriki (Teikyo University Advanced Comprehensive Research Organization Division of Artificial Intelligence, RIKEN Center for Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences (iTHEMS)) 14:05-14:35 "Interpretation of Life Phenomena Using Quantum Wave Functions and Field Theory" Kazuhiro Sakurada (Keio University Medical School and RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Sciences (IMS), Predictive Medicine Special Project (PMSP)) 14:35-14:45 Q&A 14:45-15:30 "Bridging neurophysiology and quantum-like cognition" Andrei Khrennikov (Center for Mathematical Modeling in Physics and Cognitive Sciences Linnaeus University) 15:30-15:45 Q&A 15:45-16:00 "Quantum-Like Measurement" Masanao Ozawa (RIKEN Center for Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences (iTHEMS), RIKEN TRIP FQSP, and Nagoya University) 16:00-16:05 Closing Remarks Satoshi Iso (Director, RIKEN Center for Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences (iTHEMS)) Host Laboratory: Predictive Medicine Special Project, RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Sciences (IMS) / RIKEN Center for Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Science (iTHEMS) *Registration is required by April 14 via the registration form. Contact: Predictive Medicine Special Project (pmsp-web@ml.riken.jp)

Venue: Meeting Room 305, Brain Science Ikenohata Research Bldg. (C56), RIKEN Wako Campus

Event Official Language: English

Searching For Anomalies with Foundation Models

April 16 (Thu) 14:00 - 15:30, 2026

Vinicius Massami Mikuni (Associate Professor, Kobayashi-Maskawa Institute for the Origin of Particles and the Universe (KMI), Nagoya University)

This is a joint seminar with Institute for Physics of Intelligence (iπ), UTokyo Anomaly detection relaxes the assumptions of how new physics should look and extends the reach of what we can discover. However, interpreting the data and estimating backgrounds remains a challenge. In this new work, we investigate anomalous events selected by the OmniLearned Foundation model across different model sizes, performing a full analysis using CMS Open Data. Surprisingly, models of different sizes, trained on the same data with the same loss functions, select entirely different collisions. In particular, the large OmniLearned model (500M parameters) selects events that are not well described by our background model.

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

Event Official Language: English

Understanding Biological Clocks Using Methods from Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics

April 16 (Thu) 12:30 - 13:30, 2026

Gen Kurosawa (Senior Research Scientist, Division of Fundamental Mathematical Science, RIKEN Center for Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences (iTHEMS))

Imagine that you are in a room with no information about time. The room is located in a cave, where temperature and light intensity remain constant. In such an environment, would you be able to wake up tomorrow or the day after? In fact, most humans can wake up at roughly similar times on successive days. This is because we possess internal daily rhythms, known as circadian rhythms. Biological experiments have shown that such rhythms are not unique to humans, but are shared by many species on Earth. In this talk, I will introduce some open problems related to these daily rhythms, and discuss approaches based on dynamical systems theory and the renormalization group method, from the perspectives of applied mathematics and theoretical physics.

Venue: via Zoom / Seminar Room #359

Event Official Language: English

From Classical Definiteness to Geometric Predictability: Complementarity, Coherence, and Thermodynamic Triality

April 10 (Fri) 15:30 - 17:00, 2026

Ezra Acalapati Madani (Ph.D. Student, Laboratoire de Physique de l'École Normale Supérieure, France)

Wave–particle complementarity is one of the central principles of quantum mechanics, traditionally quantified through the Englert–Greenberger–Yasin relation between which-way information and interference visibility. In higher-dimensional and resource-theoretic settings, however, visibility is no longer unique, and it becomes natural to reformulate complementarity in terms of basis-dependent predictability, coherence, and mixedness. In this talk, I present two related works along this line. First, I discuss an exact complementarity relation between classical definiteness and quantumness, where definiteness is defined operationally through the resilience of a quantum state under nonselective dichotomic yes/no measurements, while the complementary quantum contribution is quantified using a Kirkwood–Dirac-based notion of coherence/interference motivated by recent KD-based coherence measures. Second, I introduce a geometric predictability defined by the Bures distance between the dephased state and the maximally mixed state. This predictability depends only on the observed measurement statistics and admits a closed form in terms of the Bhattacharyya overlap. For pure states, it satisfies an exact complementarity relation with nonclassical Kirkwood–Dirac coherence; for mixed states, this motivates a convex-roof extension whose operational meaning is the classically irreducible part of measurement randomness, with implications for guessing probability and min-entropy. Finally, motivated by the decomposition of entropy production into population and coherence contributions in quantum thermodynamics, and by standard wave–particle–mixedness triality relations, I show how the usual predictability–coherence duality can be promoted into a triality relation involving predictability, coherence, and mixedness. Altogether, the talk connects wave–particle duality, coherence resource theories, operational guessing tasks, and thermodynamic balance relations within a unified framework.

Venue: #359, Seminar Room #359

Event Official Language: English

Clumpy Outflows from Super-Eddington Accreting Black Holes

April 10 (Fri) 14:00 - 15:15, 2026

Haojie Hu (JSPS Research Fellow, University of Tsukuba)

Recent advances in X-ray spectroscopic observation have enabled researchers to reveal distinct clumpy structures in the super-Eddington outflows from the supermassive black hole in PDS 456 (XRISM Collaboration 2025), initiating detailed investigation of fine-scale structures in accretion-driven outflows. In this talk, I will introduce our high-resolution, two-dimensional radiation-hydrodynamics simulations with time-varying and anisotropic initial and boundary conditions that reproduce clumpy outflows from super-Eddington accretion flows. The resulting clumpy outflows extend across a wide range of radial distances and polar angles, exhibiting typical properties such as a size of ~10 rg (where rg is the gravitational radius), a velocity of ~0.05–0.2 c (where c is the speed of light), and about five clumps along the line of sight. Although the velocities are slightly smaller, these characteristics reasonably resemble those obtained from the XRISM observation. The gas density of the clumps is on the order of 10^-13–10^-12 g cm^-3, and their optical depth for electron scattering is approximately 1–10. The clumpy winds accelerated by radiation force are considered to originate from the region within <300 rg.

Venue: #220, 2F, Main Research Building (Main Venue) / via Zoom

Event Official Language: English

Biology Starter Meeting & Welcome 4 New Members!

April 9 (Thu) 13:00 - 15:00, 2026

Alba Nieto Heredia (Postdoctoral Researcher, Mathematical Genomics RIKEN ECL Research Unit, Division of Fundamental Mathematical Science, RIKEN Center for Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences (iTHEMS))
Takehiro Tottori (Special Postdoctoral Researcher, RIKEN Center for Brain Science (CBS))
Mariia Ivonina (Postdoctoral Researcher, Division of Fundamental Mathematical Science, RIKEN Center for Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences (iTHEMS))
Satsuki Hirasawa (Ph.D. Student, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, Hokkaido University)

This is a special 2 h event of our newly renewed Biology Study Group! This year, 4 new members are joining iTHEMS Biology. They will each give us a 15 min introduction to their research. All participants will also take 2-3 min to introduce themselves and their research topic to the new members. If time permits, we'll hold a brief organizational meeting to review the running of the biology seminars in the new fiscal year. We strongly encourage all iTHEMS members, not just biology-interested ones, to join our session at least in the 1st hour, to meet the new members and learn about their research.

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

Event Official Language: English

Quantum Computation SG seminar 2026

April 7 (Tue) 15:00 - 17:00, 2026

Self-introductions (name + research interests) and discussion about study group activities in FY2026.

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

Event Official Language: English

Physics-based eruption forecasting at Kīlauea volcano using an Ensemble Kalman Filter

April 7 (Tue) 13:00 - 14:30, 2026

Kyle R. Anderson (Research Geophysicist, California Volcano Observatory, U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), USA)

Today, most forecasts of volcanic eruptions are based on expert opinion, making them fundamentally subjective. Such forecasts have often proven successful but have clear limitations. Novel quantitative forecasting techniques have shown promise in experimental settings (hindcasting) but face numerous operational challenges and most have rarely if ever been applied to real-world eruptions (forecasting). In this talk I will discuss efforts to forecast a remarkable ongoing series of more than 40 high lava fountain eruptions at Kīlauea volcano, Hawaii, using a simple physics-based model in an Ensemble Kalman Filter (EnKF) data assimilation algorithm. Using this method, which is believed to be the first implementation of a physics-based EnKF eruption forecast, the times of Kīlauea’s lava fountain eruptions can be forecast days to weeks in advance. The method assimilates geodetic data to constrain the evolving state of the system, provides insight into the eruption mechanism and rate of magma supply to the volcano, and produces fully probabilistic forecasts. These forecasts are combined with other information, including forecasts based on machine learning algorithms, to derive forecast windows, which are disseminated to the public and to partner agencies for hazards mitigation activities. In this way, novel eruption forecasting tools are continually developed which serve an important public need while also improving understanding of the volcanic system.

Venue: Hybrid Format (RIKEN R-CCS room C107 and Zoom)

Event Official Language: English

A Hybrid Pseudo-spectral–PINN Approach to Black Hole Quasinormal Modes

April 3 (Fri) 14:00 - 15:15, 2026

Alexandre M. Pombo (PD, Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Czechia)

Gravitational-wave detections by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA network have turned compact-object mergers into precision probes of strong gravity. The post-merger ringdown is particularly incisive: it is governed by quasinormal modes (QNMs), the damped oscillations that encode the remnant's structure and provide a fingerprint of the final object. While current detectors constrain the dominant mode, next-generation observatories will resolve multiple modes with high precision, placing stringent demands on the accuracy of theoretical predictions. Computing QNMs for rotating black holes is, however, a non-trivial task, as it requires solving highly coupled, complex-valued perturbation equations where standard methods struggle. In this talk, I present SpectralPINN, a hybrid solver combining Pseudo-spectral methods with Physics-Informed Neural Networks, validated at 10⁻⁵ relative accuracy. I will present results for Kerr and Kerr-Newman black holes, demonstrating the method's robustness and accuracy across parameter space, and discuss its potential for extension to more exotic compact objects relevant to next-generation detector science.

Venue: Hybrid Format (3F #359 and Zoom), Seminar Room #359

Event Official Language: English

Tensor networks for QCD in the strong-coupling expansion

April 2 (Thu) 15:30 - 17:00, 2026

Tilo Wettig (Professor, Universität Regensburg, Germany)

We present the order-separated Grassmann higher-order tensor renormalization group (OS-GHOTRG) method for QCD with staggered quarks in the strong-coupling expansion. Themethod allows us to determine the expansion coefficients of the partition function, from which we can obtain the strong-coupling expansions of thermodynamical observables. We use the method in two dimensions to compute the free energy, the particle-number density, and the chiral condensate as a function of the chemical potential up to third order in the inverse coupling 𝛽. Although the expansion itself is only a good approximation to the full theory at small 𝛽, we show that in the vicinity of the phase transition the range of applicability can be greatly extended by fits to judiciously chosen transition functions. These fits also yield a valuable expansion of the critical chemical potential in 𝛽. https://www.uni-regensburg.de/physics/hep/people/professors/wettig/index.html

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

Event Official Language: English

A mathematical promenade in microscopic locomotion

April 2 (Thu) 13:00 - 14:00, 2026

Clément Moreau (CNRS Researcher, CNRS, France)

The microscopic world offers a fascinating diversity of locomotion strategies, relying primarily on the use of flagella and cilia. These slender structures, capable of complex periodic deformations, serve as a major source of inspiration for medical microrobotics. At this scale, fluid dynamics is governed by the predominance of viscosity over inertia. This low-Reynolds number regime imposes strict physical constraints, summarized by the famous « scallop theorem »: a reciprocal deformation cannot produce any net displacement. Mathematically, this is framed by the Stokes connection, which links changes in body shape to net movement in space. This presentation proposes a journey through the modeling principles of microscopic swimmers. We will see how to derive analytical solutions to the locomotion problem by simplifying degrees of freedom or by assuming small deformation amplitudes. I will then present the perspective of control theory to address the « controllability » property, i.e. the ability of a locomotor to reach any target position and shape. Finally, I will question a classic hypothesis in the field: the inextensibility of flagella. Although the literature often assumes these structures are rigid in the longitudinal direction, certain micro-organisms and artificial robots exhibit significant compression variations. I will present recent results, based on classical modeling tools, exploring the influence of compression-curvature coupling on locomotion efficiency at low Reynolds numbers.

Venue: Hybrid Format (3F #359 and Zoom), Seminar Room #359

Event Official Language: English

Satellite Data Assimilation for Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP)

March 31 (Tue) 14:30 - 16:00, 2026

Martin Weissman (Professor, Department of Meteorology and Geophysics, University of Vienna, Austria)

Satellite data assimilation for NWP has made tremendous progress over the past decades. Most of the assimilated observations in global NWP systems are nowadays satellite radiances from passive sensor in the infrared and microwave range. Additionally, GPS radio occultation provides information on upper-level humidity that serves as important uncalibrated anchoring information for humidity. Nevertheless, there are still significant limitations, especially in terms of lacking wind information that controls atmospheric dynamics in global NWP as well as in terms of using cloud-affected radiances in regional, convection-permitting NWP. My presentation will cover recent progress of my group in these fields.

Venue: Hybrid Format (RIKEN R-CCS room C107 and Zoom)

Event Official Language: English

Ecological decline and biocultural loss in Cycas revoluta landscapes of the Amami Islands

March 31 (Tue) 13:00 - 14:00, 2026

Joshua Englehardt (Professor, Center of Archeologist Studies, El Colegio de Michoacán, Mexico)

Cycads (Cycadales) are one of the world’s most ancient plant lineages, and Cycas revoluta Thunb. (‘sotetsu,’ in Japanese) has long occupied a central place in the cultural ecologies of the Ryukyu archipelago, particularly in the Amami Islands of southern Japan. Although never domesticated, C. revoluta has held enduring alimentary, ethnoecological, and symbolic saliency within local agroecological systems, ritual landscapes, and island identities for centuries. Building on recent interdisciplinary scholarship on Japanese and Ryukyuan cycad cultures, this presentation synthesizes ethnobotanical, historical, ecological, and genetic research to detail the accelerating collapse of Amami cycad biocultural heritage. The core of this talk focuses on results from ongoing fieldwork documenting the rapid spread of cycad aulacaspis scale (Aulacaspis yasumatsui Takagi), an invasive insect that now poses an existential threat to both biological C. revoluta populations and sotetsu culture across the Amami archipelago. Drawing on systematic botanical surveys, geospatial mapping, genetic sampling, and ethnographic interviews, the presentation details how ecological decline and cultural erosion are unfolding in tandem. Population-level mortality, reproductive failure, and genetic loss are paralleled by the disappearance of knowledge, practices, and senses of place historically anchored in the islands’ cycad landscapes. By situating these findings within broader discussions of cycad use in Japan and worldwide, as well as comparative biocultural heritage studies, the presentation highlights how invasive species can rapidly destabilize long-standing human-plant relationships. The Amami case underscores the urgency of integrating biological conservation with cultural documentation at moments of irreversible ecological change, offering broader insights into island resilience, heritage loss, and the fragility of biocultural systems under accelerating environmental pressures.

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

Event Official Language: English