Volume 186

iTHEMS Weekly News Letter

Event Schedule

Events for the 4th week of February 2022

2022-02-17

Thursday, February 24, 17:00– 18:15 Quantum Matter Seminar
Friday, February 25, 12:30- 13:30 Coffee Meeting
Friday, February 25, 18:00- 18:30 External Event: RIKEN Day: Let's Talk with Researchers! "Listening to the Ringing of a Black Hole"

Hot Topic

Tetsuo Hatsuda thumbnail

The Mysterious Forces Inside the Nucleus Grow a Little Less Strange

2022-02-16

In the recent article posted in "Quanta magazine”, iTHEMS Director Tetsuo Hatsuda, visiting researcher Tetsuo Hyodo and their collaborator Laura Fabbietti in Munich are interviewed about the ongoing studies on the mysteries of nuclear forces using the Japanese supercomputers and the European Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

See related links for details.

Research News

Hidetoshi Taya thumbnail
Masaru Hongo thumbnail

RIKEN Research: Modeling high-harmonic generation without resorting to perturbation theory

2022-02-14

An advanced mathematical model that can describe high-energy interactions between light and matter has been developed by two RIKEN researchers and a collaborator [1]. The approach could be extended to offer new insights in other areas of physics.

High-harmonic generation is a powerful technique that converts laser light from one wavelength, or color, to another. Put simply, it converts a low-energy, long-wavelength photon into multiple higher energy, shorter wavelength photons.

High-harmonic generation has several applications. For example, it offers a way to create table-top sources of extreme ultraviolet or x-ray light using lasers, rather than expensive synchrotron facilities. High-harmonic generation can also produce ultrashort light pulses, as short as one attosecond ($10^{-18}$ second) or maybe even one zeptosecond ($10^{-21}$ second), which are useful for imaging extremely rapid processes such as those that occur in atoms. But high-harmonic generation is inherently difficult to model mathematically, and thus understand fully.

Now, Hidetoshi Taya and Masaru Hongo from the RIKEN Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences (iTHEMS) Program, together with their colleague Tatsuhiko Ikeda from the University of Tokyo, have developed an analytical approach to high-harmonic generation in the so-called non-perturbative regime for the first time.

To read more, please visit the related link.

Reference

  1. Taya, H., Hongo, M. & Ikeda, T. N., Analytical WKB theory for high-harmonic generation and its application to massive Dirac electrons, Phys. Rev. B 104, L140305, doi: 10.1103/PhysRevB.104.L140305

Seminar Report

iTHEMS Biology Seminar by Dr. Takashi Okada on December 23, 2021

2022-02-14

The Hidden Markov Models (HMM) have been used in a variety of fields for different purposes.
I reviewed HMM and basic algorithms such as the forward algorithm. Then, I explained how this statistical framework can be applied to biological problems.

Hidden Markov Models and their applications image

Seminar Report

ABBL/iTHEMS Astro Seminar by Dr. Yutaka Hirai on January 28, 2022

2022-02-16

Dr. Yutaka Hirai gave an excellent talk on Galactic archaeology with r-process elements. He showed that his high-resolution simulations of galaxies suggest that binary neutron star mergers play an important role in enriching r-process elements in dwarf galaxies and the Milky Way. He also showed that r-process enhanced stars in the Milky Way tend to form in dwarf galaxies previously accreted to the Milky Way. He demonstrated that the abundance of r-process elements in stars can be used as an indicator for the early evolution of the Milky Way.

Reported by Shigehiro Nagataki

Seminar Report

iTHEMS Biology Seminar by Dr. Gilberto Nakamura on February 10, 2022

2022-02-15

Stochastic processes describe systems in which one or more variables fluctuate randomly. In the first part of the talk, I reviewed basic concepts in stochastic processes and how to express them in terms of localized spin operators and the probability vector (PV). This framework is convenient to compute statistics away from meanfield approximations because it can borrow methods traditionally used in many-body problems in Physics. The second part of the talk addressed the equation for the squared norm of the PV and its correspondence with the Rényi entropy. The general idea and challenges of employing estimates of the Rényi entropy were discussed shortly after. As a practical biological application, I explained the dynamical equations for averages and fluctuations in a simple stochastic epidemic model, highlighting the effects of noise and correlations in heterogeneous finite systems.

Stochastic operators: properties and applications image

Upcoming Events

Seminar

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ABBL-iTHEMS Joint Astro Seminar

Spin transport in ultracold atomic gases

February 18 (Fri) at 14:00 - 15:00, 2022

Yuta Sekino (Postdoctoral Researcher, Astrophysical Big Bang Laboratory, RIKEN Cluster for Pioneering Research (CPR))

In condensed matter physics, transport measurement has played crucial roles in understanding fascinating phenomena such as superconductivity and quantum Hall and Kondo effects. In this talk, we discuss the usefulness of spin transport as a probe for many-body properties in ultracold atoms. In the first part, we focus on the conductivity of alternating spin current, which includes information on superfluid gap, pseudogap, and topological phase transition. In the latter part, we consider mesoscopic spin transport between two Fermi gases weakly connected with each other. Our analysis suggests that the spin current is sensitive to whether the gases have pseudogaps, which are gap-like structures in densities of states just above the superfluid transition temperature. In this talk, we also mention similarities of ultracold atoms to neutron star matter.

Venue: via Zoom

Event Official Language: English

Seminar

iTHEMS - R-CCS(FTRT) Joint Online Seminar: Second order chiral phase transition in three flavor quantum chromodynamics?

February 18 (Fri) at 16:30 - 18:00, 2022

Gergely Fejos (Assistant Professor, Institute of Physics, Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary)

We calculate the renormalization group flows of all renormalizable interactions in the three dimensional Ginzburg--Landau potential for the chiral phase transition of three flavor quantum chromodynamics [1]. On the contrary to the common belief we find a fixed point in the system that is able to describe a second order phase transition in the infrared. This shows that longstanding assumptions on the transition order might be false. If the transition is indeed of second order, our results can also be interpreted as indirect evidence that the axial anomaly restores at the transition temperature.

Reference

  1. G. Fejos, Second order chiral phase transition in three flavor quantum chromodynamics?, High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (2022), arXiv: 2201.07909

Venue: via Zoom

Event Official Language: English

Seminar

Quantum Matter Seminar

How is turbulence born: Spatiotemporal complexity and phase transition of transitional fluids

February 24 (Thu) at 17:00 - 18:15, 2022

Hong-Yan Shih (Assistant Research Fellow, Institute of Physics, Academia Sinica, Taiwan)

How a laminar flow becomes turbulence has been an unsolved problem for more than a century and is important in various industrial applications. Recently precise measurements in pipe flow experiments showed non-trivial spatiotemporal complexity at the onset of turbulence. Based on numerical evidence from the hydrodynamics equations, we discovered the surprising fact that the fluid behavior at the transition is governed by the emergent predator-prey dynamics of the important long-wavelength mode, leading to the mathematical prediction that the laminar-turbulent transition is analogous to an ecosystem on the edge of extinction. This prediction demonstrates that the laminar-turbulent transition is a non-equilibrium phase transition in the directed percolation universality class, and provides a unified picture of transition to turbulence emerging in systems ranging from turbulent convection to magnetohydrodynamics.

*Detailed information about the seminar refer to the email.

Venue: via Zoom

Event Official Language: English

External Event

Naritaka Oshita thumbnail

RIKEN Day: Let's Talk with Researchers! "Listening to the Ringing of a Black Hole"

February 25 (Fri) at 18:00 - 18:30, 2022

Naritaka Oshita (Special Postdoctoral Researcher, iTHEMS)

In the February RIKEN Day, we will have a talk with Naritaka Oshita, a researcher who is researching on the theme of "Listening to the Ringing of a Black Hole."

See related links for details.

Venue: via Zoom

Event Official Language: Japanese

Special Lecture

[Shigefumi Mori and Takashi Sakajo Special Talk] How is mathematics utilized in society? - Exploring the Essence of Mathematical Research

March 12 (Sat) at 13:00 - 14:30, 2022

Tetsuo Hatsuda (Program Director, iTHEMS)
Takashi Sakajo (Professor, Department of Mathematics, Kyoto University)
Shigefumi Mori (Director-General, Kyoto University Institute for Advanced Study (KUIAS))

Venue: via Zoom

Event Official Language: Japanese

Paper of the Week

Week 3, February 2022

2022-02-17

Revealing time-resolved particle acceleration in the recurrent Nova RS Ophiuchi
H.E.S.S. Collaboration (Naomi Tsuji)
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.08201

Title: Nonperturbative Waveguide Quantum Electrodynamics
Author: Yuto Ashida, Takeru Yokota, Atac Imamoglu, Eugene Demler
arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2105.08833v4

Title: Isospin symmetry breaking in the charge radius difference of mirror nuclei
Author: Tomoya Naito, Xavier Roca-Maza, Gianluca Colò, Haozhao Liang, Hiroyuki Sagawa
arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2202.05035v1

Title: The double detonation of a double degenerate system, from Type Ia supernova explosion to its supernova remnant
Author: Gilles Ferrand, Ataru Tanikawa, Donald C. Warren, Shigehiro Nagataki, Samar Safi-Harb, Anne Decourchelle
arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2202.04268v1

Title: Detecting Preformed-Pair Current through Nonequilibrium Noise in the BCS--BEC Crossover
Author: Hiroyuki Tajima, Daigo Oue, Mamoru Matsuo, Takeo Kato
arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2202.03873v1

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