Volume 48

iTHEMS Weekly News Letter

Research News

Review on Topological Photonics published in RMP

2019-04-01

A team of physicists led by Dr. Tomoki Ozawa (iTHEMS Senior Research Scientist) published a review article titled "Topological photonics" in Reviews of Modern Physics. Study of topological phases of matter started in solid-state physics through the discovery of the quantum Hall effect. However, it has been recognized during the past decade that topological band structures, which are at the heart of the phenomenon of the integer quantum Hall effect, are general properties of waves inside medium, and thus are much more ubiquitous. One of the most active fields outside solid-state electron systems where topological physics has been studied is photonics. This review summarizes the current status of the study of topological band structures and topological phases of matter in photonics and related fields. The review is authored by an international collaboration of eleven scientists including both theoretical and experimental researchers from eight different countries.

Hot Topic

RIKEN's community newsletter features Dr. Jason Chang at SUURI-COOL (Berkeley) thumbnail

RIKEN's community newsletter features Dr. Jason Chang at SUURI-COOL (Berkeley)

2019-04-01

Jason Chang (iTHEMS Research Scientist in LBNL) was featured in the RIKEN's community newsletter, RIKENETIC. He talks about exciting challenges and opportunities in San Francisco Bay Area. Worth reading!

Upcoming Events

Seminar

iTHEMS Seminar+discussion on "non-equilibrium physics of living matter"

April 8 (Mon) at 14:00 - 15:30, 2019

Kyogo Kawaguchi (The University of Tokyo / RIKEN Hakubi Team Leader, Nonequilibrium physics of living matter RIKEN Hakubi Research Team, RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research (BDR))
Kyosuke Adachi (Research Scientist, Nonequilibrium Physics of Living Matter RIKEN Hakubi Research Team, RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research (BDR))

14:00-14:50 (40 min. talk + 10 min discussion)
"Physical" problems in multicellular dynamics and cell differentiation
Kyogo Kawaguchi (RIKEN Hakubi Research Group)

14:50-15:30 (30 min. talk + 10 min. discussion)
Phase transition in a chromatin model with epigenetic modification
Kyosuke Adachi (Kawaguchi Lab.)

15:30- Informal discussions

Venue: Seminar Room #160, 1F Main Research Building, RIKEN

Event Official Language: English

Math Lecture

Introduction to Public-Key Cryptography

Introduction to Public-Key Cryptography (10th)

April 9 (Tue) at 13:30 - 15:30, 2019

Eren Mehmet Kıral (Visiting Scientist, iTHEMS / Visiting Scientist (JSPS Research Fellow), Faculty of Science and Technology, Sophia University)

Venue: Seminar Room #160, 1F Main Research Building, RIKEN

Event Official Language: English

Colloquium

The 8th MACS Colloquium thumbnail

MACS ColloquiumSupported by iTHEMSSUURI-COOL (Kyoto)

The 8th MACS Colloquium

April 12 (Fri) at 15:00 - 17:30, 2019

Hayato Chiba (Professor, Advanced Institute for Materials Research (AIMR), Tohoku University)

15:00- Teatime
15:15- Talk by Prof. Hayato Chiba
16:45- MACS Student Conference FY2019

The 8th MACS colloquium is supported by iTHEMS. It will be broadcasted to Wako, but if you can join the colloquium physically in Kyoto, that would be better. iTHEMS provides good confectionary at Kyoto!

Venue: Lecture room #401, Graduate School of Science Building No 6, Kyoto University

Broadcast: #235, 2F, Main Research Building, RIKEN

Event Official Language: Japanese

Workshop

International Molecule-type Workshop "Frontiers in Lattice QCD and related topics"

April 15 (Mon) - 26 (Fri), 2019

International Molecule-type Workshop "Frontiers in Lattice QCD and related topics" will be held in Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics (YITP) on April 15 - 26, 2019 under the support of iTHEMS and YITP.

Lattice quantum chromodynamics (QCD) is a systematic method to investigate strong interaction of hadrons with numerical simulations. In this workshop, frontiers of lattice QCD will be discussed under relaxed atmosphere in Kyoto.

Organizers: Sinya Aoki (YITP), Yasumichi Aoki (RIKEN, CCS), Hidenori Fukaya (Osaka U.), Shoji Hashimoto (KEK), Tetsuo Hatsuda (RIKEN, iTHEMS), Takumi Doi (RIKEN, Nishina Center), Atsushi Watanabe (YITP)

Venue: Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics, Kyoto University

Event Official Language: English

Colloquium

iTHEMS Colloquium

Quantum computing: current status and prospects

April 25 (Thu) at 15:00 - 16:30, 2019

Keisuke Fujii (Professor, Graduate School of Engineering Science, Osaka University)

Supported by extensive experimental efforts for realization of quantum computing devices, quantum computers of a hundred qubits are now within reach in the near future. This level of a quantum computer is not enough for fully fledged fault-tolerant quantum computing, but is still expected to have computational advantage against classical computers.
Such a noisy intermediate scale quantum computing (NISQ) device is thought to be a testbed for proof-of-principle experiments of quantum algorithms and verification of quantum physics in the limit of extremely high complexity.
In this talk, I will provide a general introduction to quantum computing starting from how and for what quantum computers work. Then I will provide an overview of the current status and prospects of the field of quantum computing. As the final part, I will also talk about our own activities on quantum-classical hybrid algorithm, which is a kind of quantum algorithms specifically designed for the NISQ devices.

Venue: Suzuki Umetaro Hall, 1F Bioscience Building, RIKEN

Broadcast: R511, Computational Science Research Building, R-CCS, Kobe Campus, RIKEN / SUURI-COOL (Kyoto), #204-205, 2F Maskawa Building for Education and Research, North Campus, Kyoto University / SUURI-COOL (Sendai), #303, 3F AIMR Main Building, Advanced Institute for Materials Research (AIMR), Tohoku University

Event Official Language: English

Seminar

Berkeley-iTHEMS Seminar

Three quantizations of conformal field theory

May 1 (Wed) at 15:40 - 17:30, 2019

Tsukasa Tada (Coordinator, iTHEMS / Vice Chief Scientist, Quantum Hadron Physics Laboratory, RIKEN Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science (RNC))

Needless to say, conformal field theory is elemental in the study of string theory, statistical quantum systems, and various quantum field theories.
Two-dimensional conformal field theory is usually quantized by the so-called radial quantization. However, this is not the only way. As a matter of fact, there are two other distinctive choices for the time foliation, or equivalently, the Hamiltonian. One of these choices yields the continuous Virasoro algebra, while the other choice leads to the Virasoro algebra on a torus. The former case corresponds to the recently found (and perhaps less known) phenomenon, sine-square deformation. The latter yields the well-known entanglement entropy. I will present a comprehensive treatment of these three quantizations and discuss its physical implications.

Venue: Old LeConte Hall 402, UC Berkeley

Event Official Language: English

School

AIMR Main Building venue photo

g-RIPS Sendai 2019

June 17 (Mon) - August 9 (Fri), 2019

GRIPS (Graduate-level Research in Industrial Projects for Students)-Sendai program was held last summer (June 18 - Aug. 10, 2018) with the support of iTHEMS as well as other institutions and companies. Two industrial projects were launched under the suggestion of TOYOTA and NEC, and two teams composed of US and Japanese students have worked intensively to find solutions of these problems. See for the details of the GRIPS program and the summary of activities at GRIPS-Sendai 2018.

This year, GRIPS-Sendai program will be held from June 17 through Aug. 9, 2019 with a larger scale under the support of iTHEMS. Stay tuned for further information.

Venue: 4F Research Space, AIMR Main Building, Advanced Institute for Materials Research (AIMR), Tohoku University

Event Official Language: English

Person of the Week

Self-introduction: Hokuto Konno

2019-04-04

I have been working in the mathematical study of gauge theory. In particular, I have developed Seiberg-Witten theory and Yang-Mills theory for families of 4-dimensional manifolds, and used them to examine the topology and geometry of such families. One of typical objects studied using gauge theory for families is the space consisting of all symmetries of a given 4-dimensional manifold. The space of symmetries is a natural mathematical object, but at the same time, this space is an infinite-dimensional complicated space in general, and consequently quite hard to attack. Interestingly, some of my recent work with several groups revealed that we can extract information about the space of symmetries of some 4-dimensional manifolds using gauge theory for families. I am trying to go ahead with this direction, and also to develop other aspects of gauge theory, relating to a sort of topological quantum field theory.

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