Volume 320

iTHEMS Weekly News Letter

Hot Topic

Keita Mikami thumbnail

Farewell message from Keita Mikami

2024-09-10

Our colleague Keita Mikami will move on to a new career as an assistant professor at University of Hyogo as of Oct. 1, 2024. We all will miss him and wish him the best of luck in his latest endeavor.
Here is a message from Keita Mikami:

My five and a half years at iTHEMS have been truly outstanding. The environment here has been exceptional, significantly enriching my research in many different ways. One of the key highlights has been the stimulating and insightful discussions with researchers from diverse fields. Furthermore, my experiences working on MACS, organizing math seminars, and coordinating other events such as SSP have been invaluable. My research visit to UCB was also an incredible experience. I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to all the researchers and assistants at iTHEMS. I am especially grateful to the director, Hatsuda-san, for his unwavering support.As I move forward, I hope to continue interacting with the iTHEMS community, albeit in a new capacity. Once again, thank you for these five wonderful years.

Research News

Congcong Le thumbnail
Ching-Kai Chiu thumbnail

RIKEN Research: More magic in twisted layers of graphene

2024-09-10

Magnetic fields can engineer flat bands in twisted graphene layers to create a new playground for exotic physics, RIKEN physicists have shown.
The exotic properties of graphene—a single layer of carbon atoms in a hexagonal lattice—are now well established. Electrons effectively move through graphene as if they have no mass. This is an exciting prospect for creating electronic devices with functionalities beyond those of silicon.
But things get even weirder when two or more layers of graphene are combined.

To read more, please visit the related link.

Reference

  1. Congcong Le, Qiang Zhang, Fan Cui, Xianxin Wu, and Ching-Kai Chiu, Double and Quadruple Flat Bands Tuned by Alternative Magnetic Fluxes in Twisted Bilayer Graphene, Phys. Rev. Lett. 132, 246401 (2024), doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.132.246401

Upcoming Events

Workshop

iTHEMS Cosmology Forum #2 - Stochastic gravitational waves: fossils from the early universe

September 27 (Fri) at 9:00 - 18:00, 2024

Keitaro Takahashi (Professor, Faculty of Advanced Science and Technology, Kumamoto University)
Kazuyuki Sugimura (Assistant Professor, Graduate School of Science, Hokkaido University)
Ryusuke Jinno (Associate Professor, Graduate School of Science, Kobe University)
Yuichiro Tada (Designated Assistant Professor, C-Lab, Department of Physics, Institute for Advanced Research, Nagoya University)

iTHEMS Cosmology Forum Workshop is a series of short workshops, each focused on an emerging topics in cosmology. The targeted audience is cosmologists, high-energy physicists and astronomers interested in learning about the subject, not just those who have already worked on the topic. The goal of the workshop is to provide working knowledge of the topic and leave dedicated time for discussions to encourage mutual interactions among participants.

The second workshop is devoted to explanations of the stochastic gravitational wave background (SGWB). The SGWB is a significant detection of GW from pulsar timing arrays. The origin of this background could be either supermassive black holes or primordial. Surprisingly, both of these early Universe mechanisms are not well understood. This one-day workshop gathers both the observational and theoretical aspects of this growing topic.

The workshop will be in English. The workshop venue will be either at Main Research Building #435-437 or at Okochi Hall, and we will decide and announce which one will be actually used after the registration is closed.

The workshops are organised by the iTHEMS Cosmology Forum working group, which is the successor of the Dark Matter Working Group at RIKEN iTHEMS.

Invited Speakers:
Keitaro Takahashi (Kumamoto University)
TBA

Kazuyuki Sugimura (Hokkaido University)
Supermassive black hole formation

Ryusuke Jinno (Kobe University)
First-order phase transitions and gravitational wave production in the early Univers

Yuichiro Tada (Nagoya University)
Scalar-induced gravitational waves as a cosmological phonograph

Time table:
09:00-09:30 -- Opening remarks and coffee
09:30-10:45 -- Takahashi (keynote)
10:45-11:45 -- Sugimura
11:45-13:30 -- Lunch time
13:30-14:30 -- Jinno
14:30-15:30 -- Discussion and coffee
15:30-16:30 -- Tada
16:30-17:30 -- Panel Discussion

Organisers:
Kohei Hayashi, Nagisa Hiroshima, Derek Inman, Amaury Micheli, Ryo Namba

Venue: #435-437, 4F, Main Research Building, RIKEN

Event Official Language: English

Conference

Integrated Innovation Building (IIB) venue photo

Workshop: The 5th "Medicine and Mathematics" Workshop

September 29 (Sun) - 30 (Mon), 2024

We will have the 5th workshop on "Medicine and Math" in Kobe (hybrid style) on Sep. 29-30, 2024.
For more information and registration, please visit the related links.

Organizers:
Akihisa Yamamoto (RIKEN iTHEMS)
Tetsuo Hatsuda (RIKEN iTHEMS)
Motomu Tanaka (Heidelberg Univ. / Kyoto Univ.)
Hiroshi Suito (Tohoku Univ. / RIKEN iTHEMS)
Eiryo Kawakami (Chiba Univ. / RIKEN R-IH)
Takashi Sakajo (Kyoto Univ. / RIKEN iTHEMS)

Venue: 8F, Integrated Innovation Building (IIB), Kobe Campus, RIKEN / via Zoom

Event Official Language: Japanese

Workshop

Integrated Innovation Building (IIB) venue photo

Third Workshop on Density Functional Theory: Fundamentals, Developments, and Applications (DFT2025)

March 25 (Tue) - 27 (Thu), 2025

The density functional theory (DFT) is one of the powerful methods to solve quantum many-body problems, which, in principle, gives the exact energy and density of the ground state. The accuracy of DFT is, in practice, determined by the accuracy of an energy density functional (EDF) since the exact EDF is still unknown. Currently, DFT has been used in many communities, including nuclear physics, quantum chemistry, and condensed matter physics, while the fundamental study of DFT, such as the first principle derivations of an accurate EDF and methods to calculate many observables from obtained densities and excited states, is still ongoing. However, there has been little opportunity to have interdisciplinary communication.

On December 2022, we had the first workshop on this series (DFT2022) at Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics, Kyoto University, and several interdisciplinary discussions and collaborations were started. On February 2024, we had the second workshop on this series (DFT2024) at RIKEN Kobe Campus, and more stimulated discussion occured. To keep and extend collaborations, we organize the third workshop. Since the third workshop, we extend the scope of the workshop to the development and application of DFT as well. In this workshop, the current status and issues of each discipline will be shared towards solving these problems by meeting together among researchers in mathematics, nuclear physics, quantum chemistry, and condensed matter physics.

This workshop mainly comprises lectures/seminars on cutting-edge topics and discussion, while sessions composed of contributed talks are also planned.

Venue: 8F, Integrated Innovation Building (IIB), Kobe Campus, RIKEN / via Zoom

Event Official Language: English

Paper of the Week

Week 3, September 2024

2024-09-12

Title: Exotically knotted closed surfaces from Donaldson's diagonalization for families
Author: Hokuto Konno, Abhishek Mallick, Masaki Taniguchi
arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2409.07287v1

Title: Relativistic BEC extracted from a complex FRG flow equation
Author: Fumio Terazaki, Kazuya Mameda, Katsuhiko Suzuki
arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2409.04361v1

Title: Remote Hawking-Moss instanton and the Lorentzian path integral
Author: Daiki Saito, Naritaka Oshita
arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2409.03978v1

Title: From annular to toroidal pseudo knots
Author: Ioannis Diamantis, Sofia Lambropoulou, Sonia Mahmoudi
arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/2409.03537v1

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