Workshops

The workshop will bring together experts from nuclear physics, astrophysics, and cold atomic gases to develop an improved understanding of the physics of strongly interacting matter, with a particular focus on neutron stars. The main topics of the workshop will be microscopic calculations of the equation of state, insights from other systems such as cold atomic gases, observations of neutron stars and neutron star mergers, the physics of the neutron star crust, and experimental constraints on neutron-rich matter.

Quantum technology is a fast-developing field with a wide range of promising near-term applications, from quantum simulation of quantum many-body systems to hybrid quantum-classical algorithms. The aim of the Quantum Science Generation Workshop 2024 is to cover some of the most important aspects of those developments and provide an equilibrated up-to-date overview of the most active areas of research within this field. The workshop’s topics will include (i) optical and condensed matter platforms for quantum computing; (ii) quantum simulation of problems of interest for condensed matter, nuclear, high-energy, or gravitational physics; and (iii) hybrid quantum algorithms for optimization problems. The workshop is specifically addressed to young researchers at the PhD/PostDoc level, active in different areas of quantum science and technologies with the aim of promoting and initiating fruitful scientific discussion.

Neutron stars are rich laboratories for physics, combining all four fundamental interactions and many phenomena associated with them under extreme conditions. One of the most intriguing questions is: what type of matter do we find in the core of such a compact object? One of the conceivable composition is a strangeness-dominated hadronic matter. However, the determination of the EOS of such neutral hadronic matter remains even after many decades of research one of the biggest challenges. Hadrons with strangeness embedded in the nuclear environment, hypernuclei, strange atoms, and multiparticle correlations are the most relevant terrestrial laboratories to approach the many-body aspect of the three-flavor strong interaction in the laboratory. The goal of the workshop is to assess the present status of the field, to agree upon future cutting-edge studies and to define the experimental objectives. The workshop will help to identify potential synergies between the different activities, which might also set the framework for new networking activities between researchers.

The proposed workshop is dedicated to studying small-x physics in the beyond the eikonal approximation, that is, concentrating on the phenomena suppressed by one or more powers of Bjorken x which are usually neglected in the traditional eikonal small-x physics. These include questions about the proton spin structure and the spin puzzle at small x, involving the spin-dependent PDFs and TMDs, along with the power-of-x corrections to the eikonal scattering on a nucleus, which are enhanced by the powers of the atomic number of a large nucleus and are, therefore, important. All these questions are central to the physics to be probed at the future Electron-Ion Collider (EIC). Attempts at unifying large-x and small-x evolution will also be discussed.

From stochastic annealing to diffusion models, the unreasonable effectiveness of physics concepts for the design of powerful machine learning algorithms has become increasingly apparent over the past two decades. Likewise, similarities between renormalization group transformations and neural networks are being explored for various applications, ranging from hierarchical models in computer vision to trivializing maps in lattice field theory. On the other hand, there has als been growing interest in the utilization of information bottleneck and quantum field theory techniques towards an improved theoretical understanding of the empirical successes of deep learning. Furthermore, exciting mathematical connections between functional renormalization group equations and optimal transport theory are being understood for the first time. This interdisciplinary workshop aims to provide an interface for experts from different fields sharing a common interest in this topic, with the goal of advancing our collective understanding and identifying promising directions for future work.

Which is the connection between quantum physics and general relativity (i.e. gravity)? Despite the various proposed Quantum Gravity theories, it is not yet clear if gravity should indeed be quantized. Actually, there are proposals going in the opposite direction, i.e. to gravitize quantum physics, or even models where gravity is an emergent phenomenon from quantum collapse. At the other side of the spectrum, Quantum Theory itself faces the “measurement problem”, expressed by the Schroedinger’s cat paradox, which received numerous possible solutions, including the collapse models, some of which connected with gravity. We plan to discuss in the framework of our workshop the interplay between Quantum Gravity and Quantum Collapse Models, in particular in relation to nuclear and atomic physics energy scale signatures for experiments in underground laboratories, which, thanks to their extreme precision, can test theories beyond the Standard Model facing the clash between quantum theory and gravity.

The general scientific goal of this workshop addresses the high gluon density regime of QCD to observe saturation and diffractive production at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) being built in the US at BNL.

Direct nuclear reactions, processes such as nucleon transfer, knockout, anti-nucleon capture have been extensively exploited by experiments to learn about the structure of exotic isotopes far away from stability, to infer properties of the nuclear forces, to describe nucleosynthesis and to learn about the nuclear equation of state. In this respect, nucleon-nucleus optical potentials are of great importance since they are the fundamental building blocks needed to predict reaction observables to address such a wide range of Nuclear Physics facets. Traditional phenomenological optical potential parameterizations are fully reliable only in specific regions of the nuclear chart, near the stable isotopes they were fitted to. On the contrary, microscopically derived potentials can be systematically extended to isotopes far from stability that are the focus of modern experimental searches. This workshop will address the state-of-the-art of nuclear optical potentials to foster advances in their accuracy and handling of uncertainty propagation.

Laser-driven ion and electron accelerations open a unique opportunity to probe/trigger new phenomena in nuclear physics. The intensive beams produced by high power lasers can generate neutrons/gamma rays which can be orders of magnitude denser both in time and space than classical accelerators. Thus, rare physical events—which were far from reach before—can be studied for the first time. This workshop will bring together interdisciplinary researchers, including the broadly defined nuclear and laser-plasma communities, to share existing ideas and discuss key issues. Topics include (but are not limited to): laser-driven particle accelerations, laser-driven neutron/gamma-ray sources, multi-photon pumping of nuclear isomer states, neutron captures related to nucleosynthesis, gamma-ray lasers and strong QED effects. Progress in these topics will broaden our current theoretical understanding of nature and bring tremendous practical applications. We aim to promote free discussions and initiate collaborative groups across disciplines to explore and tackle this new regime.

We want to bring together the communities of the LHC and the EIC, with the focus on quarkonium studies and their sensitivity to hadron structure and saturation. This includes shedding light on an enhanced understanding of quarkonium production mechanisms. Reactions involving quarkonia can provide us with a novel channel to access (gluon) spin-dependent and multi-dimensional observables. At the same time, they offer us additional constraints on the collinear nucleon and nuclear parton distributions. With the EIC at present in the R&D phase, this is a most favorable time to gather both the theory and experimental communities of the LHC and EIC.