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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.
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).
Sally DawsonIn recognition of her outstanding scientific achievements in the field of Theoretical Physics, Dr Sally Dawson is to be awarded the honorary doctorate of the Combined Faculty of Mathematics, Engineering and Natural Sciences of Heidelberg University. The Faculty is paying tribute to her contributions, particularly to the discovery and physics of the Higgs Boson. Dr Dawson, researcher at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, has had close connections for many years with the elementary particle research community in Germany, and Heidelberg in particular.
The honorary doctorate will be presented by Rector Prof Dr Bernhard Eitel at an award ceremony on Thursday (Oct 13) at 6 pm in the Great Hall of the Old University (Alte Aula). The laudatory address will be given by STRUCTURES member Prof Dr Jürgen Berges, Dean of Heidelberg's Physics & Astronomy Department. Dr Dawson will then give the “Hans Jensen Lecture” on the topic “Why Study Particle Physics? Tackling the Big Questions”. The lecture series commemorates Hans Jensen, a Heidelberg researcher in the field of Theoretical Physics who received the Nobel Prize in 1963.
For more information, see also Heidelberg University's press release.
The 49th Heidelberg Physics Graduate Days of the Heidelberg Graduate School for Physics (HGSFP) take place on October 10 - 14, 2022. With the Graduate Days, co-organised by STRUCTURESthe HGSFP offers advanced students and researchers a biannual spring/autumn school featuring different topics from various fields of physics. Participants are encouraged to broaden their perspective in physics by attending introductory courses on topics that are unfamiliar to them, or deepen their knowledge by attending specific courses that may be offered at a deeper level. Courses are held in English.
The schedule and further information can be found on the Graduate Days Website.
Click the image to open the poster as PDF.The Flagship Initiative: Engineering Molecular Systems (FI EMS) invites all PhDs and PostDocs working in the field of Engineering Molecular Systems at Heidelberg University (and its partner institutions) to their young scientist retreat at Trifels on November 24th – 26th 2022. There will be a scientific program with talks and posters as well as some time for social activities. Registration is open until October 10th.
Further information: