セミナー

The Rectangular Peg Problem and microlocal sheaf theory

2026年2月17日(火) 14:00 - 15:00

池 祐一 (東京大学 大学院数理科学研究科 准教授)

The Square Peg Problem asks whether every Jordan curve in the plane contains four distinct points that form the vertices of a square. This problem was proposed by Toeplitz in 1911 and remains unsolved in full generality. It can be generalized to the Rectangular Peg Problem, which concerns the existence of inscribed rectangles with a prescribed aspect ratio. Recently, Greene and Lobb successfully applied techniques in symplectic geometry to the problem and obtained new results. In this talk, I will explain how microlocal sheaf theory allows us to further extend their approach and affirmatively solve the Rectangular Peg Problem for a large class of Jordan curves, including all curves of finite length. This is joint work with Tomohiro Asano.

会場: セミナー室 (359号室)

イベント公式言語: 英語

Persistent homology and its applications

2026年2月17日(火) 11:00 - 12:00

池 祐一 (東京大学 大学院数理科学研究科 准教授)

Persistent homology is one of the main tools in topological data analysis (TDA), which encodes the topological features of given data into persistence diagrams. It has been successfully applied to various fields such as material science and computer graphics. In this talk, I will provide an overview of persistent homology and its applications. Furthermore, I will also discuss its integration with machine learning, specifically how persistent-homology-based loss functions can be used to regularize the topological structure of parameters.

会場: セミナー室 (359号室)

イベント公式言語: 英語

Monitoring the complexity and dynamics of mitochondrial translation

2026年2月12日(木) 16:00 - 17:00

脇川 大誠 (理化学研究所 開拓研究所 (PRI) 岩崎RNAシステム生化学研究室 リサーチアソシエイト)

Since mitochondrial translation leads to the synthesis of the essential oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS) subunits, exhaustive and quantitative delineation of mitoribosome traversal is needed. Here, we developed a variety of high-resolution mitochondrial ribosome profiling derivatives and revealed the intricate regulation of mammalian mitochondrial translation. Harnessing a translation inhibitor, retapamulin, our approach assessed the stoichiometry and kinetics of mitochondrial translation flux, such as the number of mitoribosomes on a transcript, the elongation rate, and the initiation rate. We also surveyed the impacts of modifications at the anticodon stem loop in mitochondrial tRNAs (mt-tRNAs), including all possible modifications at the 34th position, in cells deleting the corresponding enzymes and derived from patients, as well as in mouse tissues. Moreover, a retapamulin-assisted derivative and mito-disome profiling revealed mitochondrial translation initiation factor (mtIF) 3-mediated translation initiation from internal open reading frames (ORFs) and programmed mitoribosome collision sites across the mitochondrial transcriptome. Our work provides a useful platform for investigating protein synthesis within the energy powerhouse of the cell.

会場: セミナー室 (359号室) 3階 359号室とZoomのハイブリッド開催

イベント公式言語: 英語

Recent progress in the resource theory of asymmetry and its applications

2026年2月12日(木) 13:30 - 15:00

田島 裕康 (九州大学 大学院システム情報科学研究院 情報学部門 准教授)

If you are not affiliated with RIKEN, please register using the registration form. Registration deadline: 12nd Feb. (Thu), 2026 Symmetry and symmetry breaking are among the central themes in physics and have attracted the interest of many physicists. Recently, the resource theory of asymmetry (RTA) [1-4], which approaches these issues from the perspective of resource theories, has been actively studied. In the past few years, several foundational advances have been made in this framework. In particular, the iid-complete monotone that plays a role analogous to entanglement entropy has been identified for arbitrary compact Lie groups [2] as well as for arbitrary finite groups [3]. The resolution for compact Lie groups includes, as a corollary, a solution to the Marvian–Spekkens conjecture [4]. Building on this theoretical foundation, several developments related to the Wigner–Araki–Yanase (WAY) theorem [5-7] have also been obtained. These include extensions of the WAY theorem to the implementation of arbitrary unitary gates [8], and a unification of the WAY-type theorems, i.e. the WAY theorem, the Eastin–Knill theorem (a fundamental limitation on error correction under symmetry) [9], and the above unitary-gate results. The unification is formulated a universal trade-off inequality relating symmetry, irreversibility, and quantumness for arbitrary quantum dynamics [10]. Using this tradeoff relation, the WAY-type limitations can now be applied, for example, to quantum thermodynamics[11] and black hole evaporation [10] etc. If time permits, I will also briefly touch upon some other recent developments, such as extensions of the above tradeoff and the WAY theorem to general resource theory beyond symmetry [12].

会場: セミナー室 (359号室) 3階 359号室

イベント公式言語: 英語

Quantum Electrodynamics of Strong Laser-Matter Interaction: The Ongoing Journey and Beyond

2026年2月10日(火) 10:00 - 12:00

Ciappina Marcelo (Professor, Guangdong Technion, China)

会場: セミナー室 (359号室) (メイン会場) / via Zoom

イベント公式言語: 英語

Finite-size effects on the QCD critical point

2026年2月9日(月) 15:30 - 17:30

Gyozo Kovacs (Research Fellow, Institute of Theoretical Physics, University of Wroclaw, Poland)

[Joint seminar hosted by QMS Team (iTHEMS) and FTR Team (R-CCS)] While effective approaches are important tools in the search for the QCD critical point, the physical systems they describe differ in several aspects from those in heavy-ion collisions and from unextrapolated lattice QCD. A primary discrepancy is the system size, which is infinite only in effective model calculations. Various implementations exist to account for the resulting finite-size effects. Beyond the frequently used methods, we present a comprehensive mean-field approach that allows for both infinite- and finite-size calculations, even within a complex parameter space. We discuss the general impact of finite-size effects on key observables, such as conserved charge fluctuations, and on the analytic structure of the thermodynamic potential. 15:30-16:30 Lecture 16:30-17:30 Discussion with coffee

会場: 研究本館 (メイン会場) / via Zoom

イベント公式言語: 英語

What can we learn from kilonovae about nucleosynthesis and high-density matter?

2026年2月9日(月) 14:00 - 15:15

オリバー・ユスト (Postdoctoral Researcher, GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung, Germany)

The electromagnetic transients accompanying neutron-star mergers (NSMs), called kilonovae, are powered by the radioactive decay of freshly synthesized heavy elements. As such they should contain rich information about the ejected matter and the properties of the extremely dense meta-stable neutron-star remnant formed right after the collision. However, extracting such information from observed kilonova light curves and spectra remains a challenging endeavor, which requires sophisticated models of various hydrodynamic processes and neutrino transport effects, detailed knowledge of nuclear and atomic physics, as well as complex radiative transfer calculations. In this talk I will report recent efforts from our "HeavyMetal" collaboration aimed at deciphering kilonovae.

会場: セミナー室 (359号室) 3階 359号室とZoomのハイブリッド開催

イベント公式言語: 英語

Quantitative characterization of microbial diversity and environmental adaptation

2026年2月5日(木) 13:00 - 14:30

松本 美緒 (理化学研究所 開拓研究所 (PRI) 鈴木地球・惑星生命科学研究室 大学院生リサーチ・アソシエイト)
鈴木 志野 (理化学研究所 開拓研究所 (PRI) 鈴木地球・惑星生命科学研究室 主任研究員)

イベント公式言語: 英語

Scalable Simulation of Quantum Many-Body Dynamics with Or-Represented Quantum Algebra

2026年2月4日(水) 14:30 - 16:00

Lukas Broers (理化学研究所 計算科学研究センター (R-CCS) 量子系物質科学研究チーム 特別研究員)

High-performance numerical methods are essential for advancing quantum many-body physics, as well as for enabling the integration of supercomputers with emerging quantum computing platforms. We have developed a scalable and general-purpose numerical framework for quantum simulations based on or-represented quantum algebra (ORQA). This framework applies to arbitrary spin-systems and naturally integrates with quantum circuit simulation in the Heisenberg picture, particularly relevant to recent large-scale experiments on superconducting qubit processors [Kim et al., Nature 618, 500 (2023)]. As a benchmark, we simulate the kicked Ising model on a 127-qubit heavy-hexagon lattice, successfully tracking the time-evolution of local magnetization using up to one trillion Pauli strings. Our simulations exhibit strong scaling up to 2^17 parallel processes with near-linear communication overhead. Further, we show that our framework is naturally extended to a broader range of quantum systems, superseding the capabilities of recently established Pauli propagation methods. We present possible future directions on how to utilize our algorithm.

会場: via Zoom / セミナー室 (359号室)

イベント公式言語: 英語

From Wavefunction Sparsity to Quantum Filter-Assisted Subspace Diagonalization

2026年2月4日(水) 13:00 - 14:30

Han Xu (理化学研究所 計算科学研究センター (R-CCS) 量子系物質科学研究チーム 特別研究員)

Subspace diagonalization techniques based on quantum sampling, such as quantum selected configuration interaction (QSCI) and sample-based quantum diagonalization (SQD), are a class of quantum-centric algorithms for approximating ground-state energies of many-body systems. One of the foundational bottlenecks for SQD is due to the lack of compactness of the ground-state wavefunctions. In this talk, we will introduce a filter-assisted SQD protocol that enhances the wavefunction sparsity through a quantum-circuit transformation of the Hamiltonian. Using the Gini coefficient as a robust sparsity measure, we clarify how sparsity determines the resource requirements of SQD. To construct the quantum filter, we develop a tensor-network-based automatic circuit-encoding algorithm that encodes the target matrix product states with controllable fidelity. We benchmark the method on the quantum Ising model under the transverse and longitudinal fields, using both numerical simulations and experiments on IBM quantum hardware. Our results show that the filter-assisted protocol reduces energy-estimation errors by orders of magnitude and substantially lowers the overhead of measurement compared with standard SQD, which highlight the potential of filter-assisted protocol in quantum-centric computing for strongly correlated materials.

会場: via Zoom / セミナー室 (359号室)

イベント公式言語: 英語

Gauge fixing for open systems: A pathway to open gravity EFTs

2026年1月30日(金) 14:00 - 16:00

Maria Mylova (カブリ数物連携宇宙研究機構 (Kavli IPMU) 特任研究員)

Understanding how to gauge-fix open quantum field theories is essential for building consistent open frameworks for cosmology and gravity, where gauge symmetry must coexist with dissipation and noise and decoherence. I will present our recent work developing explicit top-down constructions of open effective field theories (EFTs) for gauge degrees of freedom, with particular emphasis on the role of gauge fixing. We implement BRST quantisation on the Schwinger-Keldysh contour and show that the in-in boundary conditions reduce the doubled global BRST symmetry to a single diagonal copy. This diagonal BRST symmetry is nevertheless sufficient to guarantee that the influence functional remains gauge invariant under two independent gauge transformations, retarded and advanced, independently of the choice of initial state, the presence of symmetry-breaking phases, and whether the gauge theory is Abelian or non-Abelian. We further clarify how this is compatible with the decoupling limit, in which the global advanced symmetry is generically broken by the state. I will conclude by outlining bottom-up implications, and how these principles provide a systematic route to causal, gauge-invariant open EFTs suitable for cosmological and gravitational applications.

会場: 研究本館 4階 445-447号室 (Hybrid)

イベント公式言語: 英語

Development of a real-time object tracking and response system

2026年1月29日(木) 13:00 - 14:00

イザク・プラナス シッジャ (理化学研究所 数理創造研究センター (iTHEMS) 数理基礎部門 特別研究員)

I will introduce the real-time tracking software and automatic response system that we are developing: TracktorLive. We created a modular system to overcome several issues in close-loop experiments, with the aim to automatise mechanical stimulus delivery or time-consuming actions, and provide tools for VR experiments in animals. This tracker, coded as a Python package, separates the processes into server and client functions to run several processes in parallel, which minimises the frame processing time, and allows running on low-end computers. We hope to implement LLM or AI functions as server processes in the future.

会場: セミナー室 (359号室)

イベント公式言語: 英語

DEEP-IN-iPI Joint Meeting

2026年1月26日(月) - 30日(金)

郭 星雨 (Lecturer, Institute of Quantum Matter, South China Normal University, China)
Gert Aarts (Professor, Department of Physics, Swansea University, UK)
施 舒哲 (Assistant Professor, Physics Department, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China)
Sung Hak Lim (Senior Researcher, Center for Theoretical Physics of the Universe (CTPU-PTC), Institute for Basic Science (IBS), Republic of Korea)
ジンヤン・リー (総合研究大学院大学 素粒子原子核コース 博士課程)
許 インイン (Research fellow, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Helsinki, Finland)

The series of DEEP-IN meetings (Jan 26–30, 2026) are joint with UTokyo Institute for Physics of Intelligence (iπ), which is a multi-day scientific program bringing together researchers to explore quantum simulations, machine learning physics, and applications in particle and nuclear physics. The tentative schedule is, UTokyo-iπ Session (Venue: #512, Faculty of Science Bldg.1, School of Science, UTokyo) Day 1: Jan 26 (Mon) 14:30–16:00 Onset of Bjorken flow in a quantum many-body simulation of the massive Schwinger model, Shuzhe Shi Day 2: Jan 27 (Tue) 14:30–16:00 Physics of Diffusion Models, Gert Aarts 16:00–17:30 Discovering Symmetry from Energy-Based Diffusion Models, Jinyang Li RIKEN-iTHEMS Session (Venue: Seminar Room #359, Main Research Building) Day 3: Jan 28 (Wed) 14:30–16:00 Understanding Galactic Dark Matter with Generative Models, Sung Hak Lim 16:00–18:00 Free Discussion ML Physics-1 Day 4: Jan 29 (Thu) 10:00–11:30 Quantum Simulations of HEP and Beyond, Xingyu Guo 14:30–16:00 Physics of Machine Learning, Gert Aarts 16:00–17:30 Storage capacity of perceptron with variable selection, Yingying Xu Day 5: Jan 30 (Fri) 11:00–14:00: Free Discussion ML Physics-2

会場: via Zoom / セミナー室 (359号室) / 東京大学 本郷キャンパス 理学部１号館

イベント公式言語: 英語

Evolution of sterile soldier castes in aphids

2026年1月21日(水) 13:00 - 14:00

植松 圭吾 (慶応義塾大学)

This seminar is jointly organized with the RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science (CSRS). Social evolution in aphids is tightly linked to the formation of galls on their host plants. Galls provide efficient colony defense and nutritionally rich feeding sites such that colony members need not forage outside, leading to high intra-group relatedness. Typically, social aphids form a gall on their primary host plant, after which winged morphs disperse to secondary host plants and establish a free-living, open colony. Remarkably, sterile soldier castes have independently evolved twice in these open colonies, where individuals live on plant surfaces without modifying their structure. These aphids raise intriguing questions about the prerequisites for eusocial evolution and the mechanisms by which two distinct social systems are maintained within a single genome. In this talk, I will first provide an overview of the life cycle and the diversity of altruistic behaviors in gall-forming aphids, and then present our studies of the evolution of a sterile soldier caste in aphids inhabiting open colonies. From a developmental perspective, we tested the hypothesis that the sterile soldiers evolved through the co-option of pre-existing soldier phenotypes in a gall, based on similarity in morphology, transcriptome and behavior. From an ecological perspective, we investigated the kin structure and altruistic behavior of young nymphs in the open colonies of pre-eusocial species, and demonstrate that young aphids exhibit altruism by yielding feeding sites to older kin. Together, we propose that the open colonies of social aphids provide an ideal model system for studying the evolution of altruism.

会場: セミナー室 (359号室) 3階 359号室とZoomのハイブリッド開催 (メイン会場) / via Zoom

イベント公式言語: 英語

Analog variational quantum eigensolver for neutral atomic quantum simulators

2026年1月20日(火) 10:00 - 12:00

長尾 一馬 (理化学研究所 計算科学研究センター (R-CCS) 量子系物質科学研究チーム 特別研究員)

会場: セミナー室 (359号室) (メイン会場) / via Zoom

イベント公式言語: 英語

Introduction to the gravitational wave background from the primordial universe

2026年1月16日(金) 16:00 - 17:15

難波 亮 (理化学研究所 数理創造研究センター (iTHEMS) 数理基礎部門 上級研究員)

Being genuine propagating degrees of freedom of the spacetime metric, gravitational waves (GWs) serve as an independent "eye" through which we can probe the evolution history of our universe. They are complementary to electromagnetic observables such as cosmic microwave background (CMB) and can act as direct messengers from the earliest stage of the universe, where conventional probes lose access. In particular, a stochastic background of GWs is widely regarded as a smoking gun of cosmic inflation. In this talk, I introduce the basic theoretical framework for GWs produced in the primordial universe and discuss how they arise from vacuum fluctuations of the metric. I also outline additional production mechanisms sourced by matter fields in the early universe and contrast their characteristic observational signatures with those of vacuum tensor modes. The emphasis of my talk will be on physical intuition and analytic derivations, with the aim of making the subject accessible to non-specialists in the astrophysics community.

会場: セミナー室 (359号室) 3階 359号室とZoomのハイブリッド開催

イベント公式言語: 英語

A one-world interpretation of quantum mechanics

2026年1月16日(金) 14:00 - 16:00

Isaac Layton (東京大学 大学院理学系研究科 物理学専攻 ポスドク研究員)

The measurement problem arises in trying to explain how the objective classical world emerges from a quantum one. In this talk I’ll advocate for an alternative approach, in which the existence of a classical system is assumed a priori. By asking that the standard rules of probability theory apply to it when it interacts with a system linearly evolving in Hilbert space, I’ll show that with a few additional assumptions one can recover the unitary dynamics, collapse and Born rule postulates from quantum theory. This gives an interpretation of quantum mechanics in which classically definite outcomes are always assigned probabilities, rather than superpositions, giving one-world instead of many. The main technical tool used is a change of measure on the space of classical paths, the functional form of which characterises the quantum dynamics and Born rules of a class of quantum-like theories. Time allowing, I will also discuss how these results clarify which additional assumptions must be accepted if one wishes to seriously consider classical alternatives to quantum gravity.

会場: 研究本館 4階 445-447号室 / via Zoom

イベント公式言語: 英語

Classical Spinning Black Hole Scattering from Quantum Amplitudes

2026年1月15日(木) 14:00 - 15:30

Dogan Akpinar (Ph.D. Student, Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics, School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Edinburgh, UK)

Scattering amplitudes have recently become a powerful tool for extracting classical observables in two-body gravitational dynamics, with direct relevance for current and future gravitational-wave experiments. In this talk, I will review how quantum scattering amplitudes can be used to obtain classical black hole scattering observables. A key focus will be the inclusion of spin effects, modelled by treating black holes as point particles in fixed-spin representations. This approach introduces a subtle ambiguity in the separation between classical and quantum information, which we resolve using our spin interpolation method. Leveraging this, we obtain, for the first time, the classical two-loop amplitude accurate to quartic order in spin, from which we extract physical observables such as linear and angular impulses using covariant Dirac brackets. Remarkably, the resulting amplitude obeys a spin-shift symmetry, remaining invariant under a shift of the black hole spin by the momentum transfer in the scattering process. Motivated by this structure, we examine the conserved quantities governing scattering and show that—at least asymptotically—the probe dynamics remain integrable through quartic order in spin. Under this asymptotic integrability, together with the spin-shift symmetry, we demonstrate that the quartic-in-spin radial action is fully determined by the aligned-spin sector. Taken together, these results advance our understanding of spinning black hole scattering and illuminate new structural features of Kerr dynamics.

会場: セミナー室 (359号室) 3階 359号室とZoomのハイブリッド開催

イベント公式言語: 英語

Enhancing the methodological framework for inferring selection with ancient DNA: theoretical insights, improvements and comparison

2026年1月15日(木) 13:00 - 14:00

リュカ・ソール (理化学研究所 数理創造研究センター (iTHEMS) 数理基礎部門 数理遺伝学理研ECL研究ユニット 特別研究員)

Over the past decade, the emergence of ancient DNA has opened new opportunities for studying evolutionary processes. However, inferring signals of selection from such data remains a methodological challenge since controlling for population stratification, admixture, and dynamically changing demographic histories, among other confounding evolutionary processes, is difficult. In this context, ancient DNA time series data, which have proliferated, have led to the development of methods based on two main frameworks: Hidden Markov Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models. In this work, we aim to clarify how these frameworks relate to the classical Wright–Fisher model, enabling targeted modeling improvements and producing more relevant comparisons across methods.

会場: セミナー室 (359号室) (メイン会場) / via Zoom

イベント公式言語: 英語

LEVERAGING EARTH OBSERVATIONS WITH MACHINE-LEARNING APPROACHES FOR WATER CYCLE MONITORING

2026年1月13日(火) 10:30 - 12:00

Victor Pellet (Professor, Laboratoire de Météorologie dynamique (LMD-X), Ecole Polytechnique, France)

Earth observation satellites provide unprecedented information to monitor the different components of the water cycle, from soil moisture to river dynamics. However, fully exploiting these observations remains challenging due to sensor limitations, data heterogeneity, complex physical processes, and spatio-temporal resolution constraints. This seminar provides an overview of machine-learning approaches that accompany and enhance remote sensing for water cycle analysis. It illustrates how statistical and machine-learning techniques can improve the exploitation of Earth observation (EO) data at different processing levels, from Level 1 to Level 4. Four examples are presented: (i) compressing hyperspectral information to reduce observation dimensionality, (ii) improving the retrieval of soil moisture from space by exploiting spatial patterns and handling missing data, (iii) harmonizing multi-source EO at the global scale for consistent water cycle monitoring, and (iv) modeling river dynamics using data-driven approaches. Together, these examples highlight the potential of machine-learning techniques to better integrate observations and improve our understanding of hydrological processes.

会場: 計算科学研究棟

イベント公式言語: 英語