News Overview
Stay informed with our latest news and announcements on this page. For more in-depth content, we also encourage visitors to explore our bimonthly STRUCTURES Newsletter magazine, which features a variety of articles, interviews with members, and background information on our latest research and activities.
A new podcast episode of “#exzellenterklaert - Spitzenforschung für alle” is online. The new episode deals with the subject “The Ocean Floor: Unexplored Interface of the Earth”. The ocean floor is a unique ecosystem. However, as of yet, only a small portion of it has been scientifically investigated. The difficulties related to accessibility necessitate ship expeditions and the use of highly specialized underwater equipment for its exploration. The Cluster of Excellence “The Ocean Floor – Earth’s Uncharted Interface” aims to initiate a new chapter in this field of research by quantifying exchange processes at this significant boundary layer and their roles in the Earth's ecosystem.
The German science podcast “Exzellent Erklärt - Spitzenforschung für alle” reflects the research diversity of Germany’s leading research institutions and Clusters of Excellence: from Antiquities to Quantum Physics. In each episode, listeners can expect insights into the interdisciplinary work of one research network.
Anna Wienhard, one of our speakers, has accepted an offer by the Max Planck society. As of November 1st, 2022, she is director at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, Leipzig. She will keep close ties with Heidelberg's research community and the Cluster of Excellence STRUCTURES. Congratulations, Anna, for obtaining this very prestigious position and all our best wishes for your work there! And thank you for all the great contributions you have made to our cluster!
Click the image to open the Newsletter as PDF.We are happy to present the eighth volume of the STRUCTURES Newsletter featuring the following topics:
- STRUCTURES Short News Oct 2022:
- Dual Superfluidity Observed in Ferromagnetic Ultracold Gas
- STRUCTURES Blog and Social Media
- Research Update: Machine learning meets quantum simulation
- 6th YRC Schöntal Workshop on “Renormalisation and Effective Theories”
- New Members and Fellows
- We Are STRUCTURES
- STRUCTURES Asks: Felix Joos
The STRUCTURES Project Management Office is happy to answer questions and to receive feedback.
The ERC Synergy Grants are awarded for collaborative research by the European Research Council.The European Research Council awards Prof Anna Marciniak-Czochra (IAM/BioQuant/IWR) and Jun-Prof Simon Anders (Bioquant/ZMBH) together with Dr Laure Bally-Cuif (Institut Pasteur, Paris) and Ana Martin-Villalba (DKFZ) the highly endowed ERC Synergy grant for a pioneering research project that focuses on interdisciplinary research into the dynamics and control of neural stem cells. Stem cells are human cells with the unique ability to develop various other types of cells with specialized functions. The project “PerPetuating Stemness: From single-cell analysis to mechanistic spatio-temporal models of neural stem cell dynamics” (PEPS) is going to investigate the ability of stem cells to renew themselves and to differentiate. The PEPS team will develop and combine experimental methods with data analysis and mathematical modelling in order to understand how neural stem cells guarantee the human brain's long-term function by constantly generating new neurons necessary for its plasticity and repair. This requires an interdisciplinary and multi-scale effort to clarify how to reconcile decisions taken at the single cell level and at the population level. The ERC is making available approximately eleven million euros for the PEPS project, with almost 3.8 million going to fund the work at Ruperto Carola. The ERC Synergy Grants fund collaborative projects that, due to their complexity, require methods and expertise of multiple groups in order to achieve breakthroughs that would not be possible in individual projects.
Further information:
Anna Marciniak-Czochra's Website
Simon Anders' Website
Press Release by the European Research Council
Click the image to open the poster as PDF.On Friday, October 28, 11:15 am, there will be a special Physical Mathematics seminar by Vasily Golyshev (Bures-sur-Yvette) on Hypergeometric Calabi-Yau Motives and their Birch-Swinnerton-Dyer Volumes:
Abstract: We give closed hypergeometric expressions for the Birch–Swinnerton-Dyer volumes of certain rank $4$ weight $3$ Calabi–Yau motives presumed to be of analytic rank $1$. We compare the first derivative of the $L$–functions of these motives at the central argument $s = 2$ to the B-SD volumes.
The talk will take place in Mathematikon, SR 9 at 11h (c.t.).
Homogeneous spinor Bose gas and easy-plane ferromagnetic properties. Reproduced from Prüfer, M., Spitz, D., Lannig, S. et al. (2022), Nature Physics, Fig. 1. For details about panels (a) to (e), please refer to the caption in this publication.STRUCTURES scientists have experimentally demonstrated twofold superfluidity and dynamical thermalization in an ultracold ferromagnetic spinor Bose gas of Rubidium atoms.
Bose-Einstein condensates form an ideal ground to explore dynamical phenomena emerging in the many-body limit. Due to their rich internal structure spinor condensates give rise to intricate symmetry breaking and superfluidity features. Superfluids can flow without dissipation and are an example of a macroscopic system dominated by quantum physics. The equilibrium state of the spin-1 gas at ultralow temperatures exhibits a dual condensate in the “easy-plane” ferromagnetic phase. This is a form of matter in which all atoms show phase coherence over the whole extent of the system in both density and spin. The direct observation of this dual state has previously been challenging due to access to only short timescales or limited experimental control. In a recent experiment carried out by the group of Markus Oberthaler at the Kirchhoff Institute for Physics (KIP) in collaboration with Daniel Spitz and Jürgen Berges from the Institute of Theoretical Physics (ITP) it has been prepared and thoroughly probed for the first time. The quantum gas could be stored long enough to observe the system’s evolution towards its equilibrium state, as well as to demonstrate the emergence of long-range coherence and spin-superfluidity. The new methods and results are an important step towards understanding quantum many-body dynamics and thermalization in large magnetic spin systems.
Link to the associated publication in Nature Physics:
Prüfer, M., Spitz, D., Lannig, S. et al. Condensation and thermalization of an easy-plane ferromagnet in a spinor Bose gas. Nat. Phys. (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-022-01779-6.
Artistic view of a neural network interacting with a quantum spin system. This image was generated by the artificial intelligence DallE2.Summary by Tobias Schmale, Moritz Reh and Martin Gärttner:
Quantum simulators solve quantum many-body problems that are hard to simulate on classical computers due to the exponential increase of computational cost with the number of simulated particles. This exponential hardness also hits when performing quantum tomography, which means fully characterizing the prepared quantum states. Machine learning inspired variational approaches may overcome this challenge by restricting the manifold of trial states among which the experimentally prepared state is searched. The trick is to find structures inherent to the physical problem the simulator tries to solve, and to use these to create a compressed state representation, just like e.g. in image compression methods. In [1] we demonstrated that this method leads to a scalable tomography scheme using convolutional neural networks. We considered various experimentally relevant scenarios where we generated synthetic measurement data numerically. Working towards deploying this method on real experimental data, we recently applied it to an experiment creating entangled photon pairs [2]. A unique extension, that was possible thanks to collaborations within STRUCTURESis the use of neuromorphic hardware. Optimizing the parameters of an analog neuromorphic chip we demonstrated the encoding of Bell states [3] and quantum ground states [4].
Associated Literature:
- T. Schmale, M. Reh, M. Gärttner. Efficient quantum state tomography with convolutional neural networks. NPJ Quantum Information 8, 115 (2022).
- M. Neugebauer, L. Fischer, A. Jäger, S. Czischek, S. Jochim, M. Weidemüller, M. Gärttner. Neural-network quantum state tomography in a two-qubit experiment. Phys. Rev. A 102, 042604 (2020).
- S. Czischek, A. Baumbach, S. Billaudelle, B. Cramer, L. Kades, J. M. Pawlowski, M. K. Oberthaler, J. Schemmel, M. A. Petrovici, T. Gasenzer, M. Gärttner. Spiking neuromorphic chip learns entangled quantum states. SciPost Phys. 12, 39 (2022).
- R. Klassert, A. Baumbach, M. A. Petrovici, M. Gärttner. Variational learning of quantum ground states on spiking neuromorphic hardware. iScience 25(8), 104707 (2022).