Seminar

Models to describe how virus spreads in vitro

May 13 (Wed) 10:00 - 10:45, 2020

Catherine Beauchemin (Senior Visiting Scientist, RIKEN Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences Program (iTHEMS) / Professor, Department of Physics, Ryerson University, Canada)

This is meant as an introductory talk about my research field, virophysics, in which I apply the rigour and methods of physics to study virology. My focus is primarily in vitro (how virus spreads cell-to-cell in a cell culture) but I occasionally do some in vivo work. Recently, my hobby became tracking COVID-19 spread.

Venue: via Zoom

Event Official Language: English

Slip or (k)not: Geometry and mechanical performance of physical knots

May 7 (Thu) 17:00 - 17:45, 2020

Tomohiko Sano (PD, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland)

Knots can impart unique mechanical function to filamentary structures, with examples ranging across length scales, including DNA, polymer-chains, shoelaces, climbing ropes, tennis racket, and surgical sutures. Even though knot theory has a long history of studies in the realm of mathematics, mechanics-based studies of physical knots are much rarer. The fundamental challenge in the understanding of their mechanics under a wide range of loading conditions stems from the fact that their topology, geometry, elasticity, and friction are all tangled ingredients. In this talk, combining experiments, simulations and theory, we present the recent progress on the predictive framework for the knot performance.

Venue: via Zoom

Event Official Language: English

From Eigenvalues to Resonances

May 1 (Fri) 16:00 - 18:10, 2020

Keita Mikami (Research Scientist, RIKEN Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences Program (iTHEMS))

Resonance is one of the most studied object in mathematical study of Schrödinger operators. One possible reason is that resonance is appeared in many other fields like arithmetic, physics, and topography. This series of talks target both mathematicians and researchers in other fields. The goal of the talk is to introduce the study of resonances for two body Schrödinger operators. In the first part, we briefly review spectral theory and how we use it in the study of Schrödinger operators. The aim of this part is to introduce the audience some basic notions used in the study of Schrödinger operators. In the second part, we give brief introduction of resonances and its application to both mathematicians and researchers in other fields. We start from mathematical definition of resonances to its applications in the other fields.

Venue: via zoom

Event Official Language: English

Analyses of large-scale sequence data from “PROTIST” can reveal the eukaryotic phylogeny and evolution

April 30 (Thu) 10:00 - 10:45, 2020

Euki Yazaki (Postdoctoral Researcher, RIKEN Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences Program (iTHEMS))

Most of the phylogenetic diversity of eukaryotes is made up of unicellular eukaryotic microorganisms called protists, some of which have not known phylogenetic home (called Orphans). Orphans are likely to hold important keys to the evolution of eukaryotes. In this seminar, I will introduce present case studies that reveal phylogenetic home and organelle evolution of orphan protists through sequence analysis based on large-scale sequence data.

Venue: via Zoom

Event Official Language: English

Characterizing the continuous gravitational-wave signal from boson clouds around Galactic isolated black holes

April 27 (Mon) 16:00 - 17:00, 2020

Sylvia Zhu (Postdoctoral Researcher, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY, Germany)

Bosons such as axions or axion-like particles can form enormous clouds around black holes via the superradiance instability. As the bosons annihilate in the presence of the black hole, they produce a long-lived, slowly-evolving continuous gravitational-wave signal that is potentially detectable using the current generation of gravitational-wave interferometers.A non-detection can disfavor the existence of axions in certain mass ranges, although this is highly dependent on the Galactic black hole population. In this talk, I will discuss the expected annihilation signal from the population of isolated stellar-mass black holes in the Galaxy, and the prospects for detecting the signal using standard searches for continuous gravitational waves.

Venue: via Zoom

Event Official Language: English

Social evolution in viruses

April 22 (Wed) 10:00 - 10:45, 2020

Asher Leeks (International Program Associate, RIKEN Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences Program (iTHEMS) / Ph.D. Student, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, UK)

Viruses are normally thought of as solitary organisms. However, in reality viruses often interact with one another, and these interactions can have important consequences for how viruses evolve and cause disease. In this talk, I will show how simple models of virus-virus interactions can help us to understand some puzzling aspects of virus biology. At the end, I will also talk about a new modelling project on Covid-19 joint with Ryosuke, which considers how human actions such as social distancing could influence the evolution of virulence.

Venue: via Zoom

Event Official Language: English

Holography from field theories: a realization of AdS/CFT correspondence and beyond

March 18 (Wed) 13:30 - 14:30, 2020

Sinya Aoki

*Seminar room changed from 160 to 433. We argue that the Anti-de-Sitter (AdS) geometry in $d+1$ dimensions naturally emerges from an arbitrary conformal field theory in $d$ dimensions using the free flow equation. We first show that an induced metric defined from the flowed field generally corresponds to the quantum information metric, called the Bures or Helstrom metric, if the flowed field is normalized appropriately. We next verify that the induced metric computed explicitly with the free flow equation always becomes the AdS metric when the theory is conformal. We also show that the conformal symmetry in $d$ dimensions converts to the AdS isometry in $d+1$ dimensions after $d$ dimensional quantum averaging. This guarantees the emergence of AdS geometry without explicit calculation. We next apply this method to non-relativistic systems with anisotropic scaling symmetries, such as Lifshitz field theories and Schr\”odinger invariant theories. In consequence we obtain a new hybrid geometry of Lifshitz and Schr\”odinger spacetimes as a general holographic geometry. We also show that the bulk hybrid geometry is realized by an Einstein-Maxwell-Higgs system plus a gauge fixing term for diffeomorphism, which may be interpreted as a holographic dual of a general non-relativistic system at the boundary.

Venue: #433, Main Research Building

Event Official Language: Japanese

Index of the Wilson-Dirac operator revisited: a discrete version of Dirac operator on a finite lattice

February 25 (Tue) 16:00 - 18:10, 2020

Mikio Furuta (Professor, The University of Tokyo)

The Wilson-Dirac operator is a discrete version of Dirac operator defined on regular lattices. When the discrete version is a fine approximation of the Dirac operator on a Z/2-graded Clifford module on a torus, it is known that (1) an integer-valued index is defined for the Wilson-Dirac operator, and (2) the index is equal to the Atiyah-Singer index of the Dirac operator on the torus. These have been well established up to around 2000. The strategy of all the previous works is to make use of the discrete version of the heat kernel for Neuberger's overlap Dirac operator. Therefore the strategy cannot be generalized to mod 2 index nor family version of index. In this talk I would like to explain a new approach to the index of Wilson-Dirac operator which can be immediately generalized to these various cases. Joint work with H. Fukaya, S. Matsuo, T. Onogi, S. Yamaguchi and M. Yamashita.

Venue: Seminar Room #160

Event Official Language: English

Mining for Dark Matter substructure: Learning from lenses without a likelihood

February 17 (Mon) 14:00 - 15:30, 2020

Johann Brehmer (Postdoctoral Researcher, New York University, USA)

Dr. Brehmer gives us a talk about a method to deduce DM small structures. Please join us! The subtle imprint of dark matter substructure on extended arcs in strong lensing systems contains a wealth of information about the small-scale distribution of dark matter and, consequently, about the underlying particle physics. However, teasing out this effect is challenging since the likelihood function for realistic simulations of population-level parameters is intractable. Structurally similar problems appear in many other scientific fields ranging from particle physics to neuroscience to epidemiology, which has prompted the development of powerful simulation-based inference techniques based on machine learning. We give a broad overview over these methods, and then apply them to the problem of substructure inference in galaxy-galaxy strong lenses. In this proof-of-principle application to simulated data, we show that these methods can provide an efficient and principled way to simultaneously analyze an ensemble of strong lenses, and can be used to mine the large sample of lensing images deliverable by near-future surveys for signatures of dark matter substructure.

Venue: #424-426, Main Research Building

Event Official Language: English

Solved and open problems regarding the neighborhood grid data structure

February 7 (Fri) 16:00 - 18:10, 2020

Martin Skrodzki (Visiting Scientist, RIKEN Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences Program (iTHEMS) / Fellow, German Academic Scholarship Foundation, Germany)

February 7 at 16:00-17:00 17:10-18:10, 2020 In 2009, Joselli et al. introduced the neighborhood grid data structure for fast computation of neighborhood estimates for point clouds in arbitrary dimensions. Even though the data structure has been used in several applications and was shown to be practically relevant, it is theoretically not yet well understood even in the two-dimensional case. The purpose of this talk is to present the data structure, give a time-optimal building algorithm, and motivate several associated questions from enumerative combinatorics as well as low-dimensional (probabilistic) geometry. In case of questions that have been solved in the past, corresponding proofs will be provided. For the open question, the talk will list them as an outlook to possible future collaboration.

Venue: Seminar Room #160

Event Official Language: English

Biology Talk

February 5 (Wed) 16:00 - 16:30, 2020

Yasuo Yasui (Assistant Professor, Laboratory of Crop Evolution, Kyoto University)

Dr. Yasuo Yasui will give a 20-30 min introduction of the buckwheat project. Please feel free to join !

Venue: Seminar Room #160

Event Official Language: Japanese

ABBL/iTHEMS seminar - talk on ultra-high energy cosmic rays

January 31 (Fri) 14:00 - 15:00, 2020

Eiji Kido (Astrophysical Big Bang Laboratory, RIKEN Cluster for Pioneering Research (CPR))

Venue: Seminar Room #132

Event Official Language: English

Nucleon Structure from Quantum Chromodynamics

January 30 (Thu) 11:00 - 12:00, 2020

Jason Chang (Research Scientist, RIKEN Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences Program (iTHEMS) / LBNL/UCB, USA)

Talk of this seminar is a colloquium style, so that non-expert can enjoy. Please feel free to join. The origin of matter is one of the longest standing mysteries that have captured the human imagination. The modern description of particle and nuclear physics hypothesizes that our matter filled universe must have resulted in the underlying physical processes favoring the preservation of matter over antimatter during the initial formation of our universe. This mechanism is attributed to the fundamental breaking of particle and antiparticle symmetry in physics beyond the Standard Model. One source of asymmetry is hypothesized to reside in the neutrino sector, and intense international efforts are being pursued to observe this phenomena in neutrino scattering experiments. Precise interpretation of experimental observations benefits from a Standard Model prediction of how nuclear matter interacts with neutrinos. The modern theory governing matter and their properties is the theory of the strong interaction, quantum chromodynamics (QCD). In this talk I will discuss a QCD calculation of the nucleon form factor at zero momentum transfer, which is related to how a neutrino at rest interacts with a single proton or neutron, followed by current progress on the calculation of the proton radius which is related to the slope of the form factor. Together the calculations paves a novel way forward towards a precise determination of the nucleon form factor up to momentum transfer relevant for neutrino scattering. I will end the talk by discussing future milestones and challenges as we work towards calculations for nuclear physics starting from QCD.

Venue: #433, Main Research Building

Event Official Language: English

ABBL/iTHEMS seminar - talk on neutron stars

January 24 (Fri) 14:00 - 15:00, 2020

Hajime Sotani (Research Scientist, RIKEN Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences Program (iTHEMS) / Research Scientist, Astrophysical Big Bang Laboratory, RIKEN Cluster for Pioneering Research (CPR))

Venue: Seminar Room #132

Event Official Language: English

Semiclassical methods in mathematical quantum mechanics

January 23 (Thu) 16:00 - 18:10, 2020

Shu Nakamura (Professor, Gakushuin University)

Plan of the seminar: we separate each talk into two. In the first 60 minutes the speaker gives an introductory talk for non-mathematicians. After a short break, the second 60 minutes is spent for a bit more detailed talk for mathematicians (working in other areas). We welcome you joining both parts of the seminar or only the first/second half. Talk 1: Semiclassical analysis, microlocal analysis and scattering theory. I plan to talk about overview on the semiclassical analysis and related topics, especially its intrinsic relationship with microlocal analysis and (microlocal) scattering theory. Roughly speaking, the microlocal analysis is an application of semiclassical idea to the analysis of singularities, and its analogue in momentum space is the microlocal scattering theory. We discuss basic notions of these, and mention several recent results. Talk 2: Microlocal structure of the scattering matrix with long-range perturbations. As an example of topics discussed in Talk 1, we discuss recent results on the scattering matrix with long-range perturbations. In particular, we show that the scattering matrix is expressed as a Fourier integral operator, and in some cases we can decide its spectral properties. Our approach is fairly geometric and abstract, and thus applies not only to usual Schrödinger operators but also to higher order operators and discrete Schrödinger operators.

Venue: #435-437, Main Research Building

Event Official Language: English

Tipping point detection of nonlinear dynamics by dynamic network biomarkers, and short-term time-series data prediction by randomly distributed embedding

January 15 (Wed) 14:00 - 16:30, 2020

Luonan Chen (Professor, Excutive director, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China)

He will talk about theoretical study on complex network data, including clinical data. His talk consists of two parts: 14:00-15:00: Detecting the tipping points of dynamic processes by dynamic network biomarkers 15:00-15:30: Coffee break 15:30-16:30: Predicting future dynamics of short-term time-series data by randomly distributed embedding First part of his talk is for general audience. In second part of his talk, he will explain mathematical basis of his study in detail.

Venue: Large Meeting Room, 2F Welfare and Conference Building (Cafeteria)

Event Official Language: English

Particle acceleration in young supernova remnants with X-ray and gamma-ray observations

January 9 (Thu) 10:00 - 11:00, 2020

Naomi Tsuji

A supernova remnant (SNR) is a prominent candidate as an accelerator of galactic cosmic rays. In a widely accepted theory of diffusive shock acceleration, a particle is accelerated by diffusing back and forth across shock waves. The spectral cutoff shape of accelerated electrons is determined by diffusion and cooling and appears in the X-ray and TeV gamma-ray energy ranges, respectively, through synchrotron radiation and inverse Compton scattering. To measure the cutoff shape precisely and explore the corresponding diffusion coefficient and acceleration efficiency, we systematically analyze young SNRs that emit nonthermal X-rays and TeV gamma-rays. We found a variety of particle acceleration depending on individual SNRs: the cutoff energy is well-reproduced by the theoretical prediction in Kepler’s SNR and Tycho’s SNR, while it might be affected by the surroundings in Cassiopeia A and SN 1006. Putting all the eleven SNRs analyzed in this study together, the acceleration tends to be more efficient as the SNR evolves and becomes older, which implies a connection with turbulent production.

Venue: Seminar Room #160

Event Official Language: English

The 32nd QCD Club

December 26 (Thu) 15:00 - 17:00, 2019

Event Official Language: Japanese

Constraining superheavy dark matter with the multi-messenger observations of accompanying radiation

December 20 (Fri) 14:00 - 15:00, 2019

Yana Zhezher (Institute for Cosmic Ray Research (ICRR), The University of Tokyo)

One of the main alternatives for the weakly interacting massive particles (WIMP) dark matter scenario are the super-heavy X particles with masses larger than the weak scale by orders of magnitude. We assume the experimentally more plausible scenario of decaying superheavy dark matter (SHDM), which leads to the production secondary particles: electrons, positrons, gamma rays and neutrinos. The hypothetical X-particle has two main parameters: it’s mass MX and lifetime ?, which can be indirectly constrained by comparisons of predicted flux of secondary particles with the astrophysical observations. We present the limits on the SHDM parameters derived with the multi-messenger data from the Fermi-LAT, IceCube and other experiments.

Venue: Seminar Room #132

Event Official Language: English

Scalable Majorana vortex modes in iron-based superconductors

December 18 (Wed) 13:30 - 15:00, 2019

Ching-Kai Chiu (Senior Research Associate, Kavli Institute for Theoretical Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China)

The iron-based superconductor FeTexSe1−x is one of the material candidates hosting Majorana vortex modes residing in the vortex cores. It has been observed by recent scanning tunneling spectroscopy measurement that the fraction of vortex cores possessing zero-bias peaks decreases with increasing magnetic field on the surface of FeTexSe1−x. The hybridization of two Majorana vortex modes cannot simply explain this phenomenon. We construct a three-dimensional tight-binding model simulating the physics of over a hundred Majorana vortex modes in FeTexSe1−x. Our simulation shows that the Majorana hybridization and disordered vortex distribution can explain the decreasing fraction of the zero-bias peaks observed in the experiment; the statistics of the energy peaks off zero energy in our Majorana simulation are in agreement with the experiment.

Venue: #435-437, Main Research Building

Event Official Language: English