IPhT Conference: November 29, 2023 to December 1, 2023

The Institute of Theoretical Physics (IPhT), formerly SPhT, is internationally known for the excellence of its scientific research, but has also a very ancient history. Its evolution is inextricably linked to that of the CEA and is almost as old. Its adventure began in 1947 with a small group of physicians passionated for abstraction, and to date more than 500 people have shared the life of the Institute, as well as the many visitors from all over the world. Today, 48 permanent researchers, 25 graduate students and 30 postdoctoral fellows, as well as the support staff, work at IPhT.

9 et 10 novembre 2023

Conference: June 5 - 9 Informal workshop: June 12-16

We are glad  to inform  you that  the  27th ITZYKSON CONFERENCE will be held  from Wednesday, the 31st of May in the morning, to Friday the 2nd of June at the Institut de Physique Theorique (IPhT), CEA Universite de Paris-Saclay. This year the ITZYKSON CONFERENCE will be devoted to "Fluctuations far from  Equilibrium". You can find more details on the web-page dedicated to this event: https://indico.in2p3.fr/event/29430/ We hope that the conference will attract the interest of many participants.  We would be grateful if you could register at : https://indico.in2p3.fr/event/29430/registrations/3507/ This will take you a very little time  but it will be of great help to us for practical matters. Best regards, Tomohiro Sasamoto, Laure Sauboy and  Kirone Mallick.

The retreat of the Institute of Theoretical Physics was held in Autrans (Vercors) from May 23 to 25. The approximately one hundred participants enjoyed the benefits of the altitude and the gorgeous environment surrounding the Escandille congress center, which hosted the event. This intense and joyful retreat provided an opportunity to strengthen the cohesion between members of our laboratory and to discuss among ourselves issues of science and the life of the Institute. The IPhT is characterized by a broad spectrum of research topics. In order to highlight the skills and to pedagogically transmit the knowledge to other non-expert colleagues, 7 scientific presentations of IPhT researchers were organized, complemented by 2 presentations held by external speakers, Professors Luc Blanchet (Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris, long-term visitor at IPhT) and Emil Martinec (University of Chicago).

In the past 10 years, the French community working on maps on surfaces has come together several times per year during the so-called "maps days". The next edition of these maps days will take place at IPhT on Friday 24 June 2022. The scientific program is as follows: see also the webpage   Program: 10h15-11h15 : Nicolas Curien (Université Paris-Saclay), Parking on the infinite binary tree  11h30-12h30 : Fedor Levkovich-Maslyuk (Université Paris-Saclay / CEA), Critical phenomena for dually weighted graphs and spanning forests via matrix models 14h-15h : Zéphyr Salvy (Université Gustave Eiffel), Random planar maps decomposed into blocks: a phase study 15h15-16h15 : David Keating (University of Wisconsin-Madison), k-tilings of the Aztec diamond The talks will take place in person in the Bloch amphitheater.

Conference: June 6-10 - Workshop: June 13-17

La description microscopique des trous noirs est un défi depuis plus de quarante ans. Il existe aujourd'hui un certain nombre d'approches prometteuses pour résoudre ce problème et l'objectif principal de cette conférence et de ce workshop est de réunir des experts dans ces domaines afin d'identifier les synergies, de s'engager dans une critique constructive et de résoudre les conflits apparents. Une attention particulière sera accordée à la dynamique de la microstructure des trous noirs : comment la matière entrante est brouillée et comment l'information est récupérée. La conférence se tiendra seulement en ligne le lundi 6 juin (jour férié en France) puis en personne à l'IPhT, CEA-Saclay du mardi 7 au vendredi 10 juin. Chaque jour de la conférence sera également retransmis. Inscription sur le site web.

Mariana Graña and Stéphane Lavignac, researchers at the IPhT, are among the organizers of the 2022 session of the Planck Conference Series « From the Planck scale to the electroweak scale ». The conference will be held in Paris from May 30 to June 2nd, complemented on June 3rd by a special day dedicated to Ignatios Antoniadis, one of the founders of these conferences.

l’Institut Pascal à l’Université Paris-Saclay organise pendant six semaines avec le concours de plusieurs physiciens dont Philippe Brax de l’IPhT (du 18 octobre au 26 novembre 2021) des exposés  pour le grand public, donnés par des physiciens de renom. Dans ce cadre, Cédric Villani donnera une conférence exceptionnelle le  lundi 22 novembre à 19h30 (Institut Pascal) sur le thème La flèche du temps, du billard moléculaire à la danse des astres. l’accueil du public se fait à partir de 19h. Vous pourrez avoir davantage d’informations via ces liens : https://indico.ijclab.in2p3.fr/event/7119/ Renseignements pratiques et localisation de la conférence Affiche en PDF  

Nous organisons à l’IPhT une série de conférences sur l’utilité des simulateurs et des ordinateurs quantiques pour résoudre des grands problèmes en physique.  voir https://qcs.quantum.paris pour davantage d'informations.

  Francois Gelis's book, Problems in Quantum Field Theory, largely inspired by his QFT lectures in the Master program High Energy Physics at Ecole Polytechnique, has just been published by Cambridge University Press. This new book is a follow-up on his earlier textbook, "Quantum Field Theory", published by CUP in 2019. Editor's page  

A conference honouring the 60 years anniversary of our former colleague Denis Bernard will take place at the ENS Paris : 45 rue d’Ulm, Salle Dussane - October 14-16, 2021.

Site de la Conférence   Dates :   -le 24 septembre  à 10h   -le 1er octobre à 10h   -le 8 octobre à 10h   -le 15 octobre à 10h   -le 22 octobre à 10h   Le cours sera en mode hybride :   -Présentiel à l’IPhT :  Amphi Bloch (masques obligatoires)   -Vidéoconférence (interactif avec inscription obligatoire sur le site pour recevoir le lien)   En live (non interactif) via Ipht-TV  

Our friend and colleague Hubert Saleur has recently turned 60. A conference celebrating his anniversary and focusing on his numerous contributions to condensed matter physics, low-dimensional quantum field theory, and mathematical physics will take place at the IPhT on September 20-23, 2021.  Participation and talks will be in hybrid mode. On-site participants will have to wear masks inside the Institute building and will have to show a valid immunisation certificate or a valid negative test for SARS-CoV-2 (of less than 72 hours) upon registration on Monday morning. Since the maximum capacity of the Amphi Claude Bloch is restricted to 50 persons, registration is necessary. More details can be found on the webpage of the conference :  http://www.phys.ens.fr/~jacobsen/AMP21.html Organisers: Jesper Jacobsen (ENS Paris), Didina Serban (IPhT Saclay), Nicholas Warner (USC Los Angeles)

The meeting will be held at the Institut de Physique Théorique (IPhT-CEA) in Saclay from Sept 13 to 15 and at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris on Sept 16. It will bring together experts in the field of integrable systems and address important open questions in the calculation of correlation functions and wave functions in integrable models, with applications to N=4 Super-Yang-Mills theory, Heisenberg spin chains and 2d relativistic QFTs. Participation will be in person only. Participants will have to wear masks inside the Institute building and will have to show a valid immunisation certificate or a valid negative test for SARS-CoV-2 (of less than 72 hours) upon registration on Monday morning. The maximum capacity of the Amphi Claude Bloch being restricted to 50 persons, registration is necessary and it can be done via the corresponding link on the webpage of the conference: https://indico.in2p3.

The microscopic description of black holes has been a challenge for more that forty years.  There are now quite a number of promising approaches to solving this problem and the primary goal of this conference and workshop is to bring together experts in these areas to identify synergies, engage in constructive criticism and resolve apparent conflicts.  A significant focus will be the dynamics of black-hole microstructure: how infalling matter is scrambled and how information is recovered. The conference will involve three or four talks a day and three panel discussions.   All events will be held via Zoom and streamed to Youtube Organizers: Iosif Bena and Nick Warner

Thermalization and out of equilibrium dynamics of many body strongly interacting quantum systems have been the subject of a recent burst of research activities. In particular the dynamics of operator and information spreading (scrambling) as well as its chaotic behavior have been recently investigated starting from models originated in the context of strongly correlated many body systems and have found application to black holes physics. This has been triggered by the appearance of a new class of exactly soluble large N quantum field theories, such as the celebrated Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model. The aim of this workshop is to review the recent advances in the field and to stimulate further research in this direction which lies at the interface between statistical and condensed matter physics and high-energy/mathematical physics. Due to the current situation, the conference will take place online.

Meeting cancelled, and reported to 2020 (date to be fixed).

  The Paris-Saclay AstroParticle Symposium 2019 has begun at the Institute Pascal The 2019 AstroPascal workshop on astroparticles is taking place place at the Pascal Institute of the Paris-Saclay University. It is organized by Philippe Brax of IPhT and Yann Mambrini of LPT-Orsay.  Around 30 specialists of astrophysics, cosmology and particle physics will be invited to discuss and work on the themes: Dark Energy and Dark Matter.  The format will be flexible enough to allow for strong interactions between participants. There will be working sessions every day and on Fridays, a « conference » format day with invited speakers. We have invited confirmed researchers and are strongly encouraging the presence of their students and/or postdocs. The ultimate aim is to initiate-continue-finalise research projects in a nice environment.

  After having delivered for several years a course on quantum field theory at the Master program ¨High Energy Physics¨ at the Ecole Polytechnique, Francois Gelis's lecture notes have been published by Cambridge University Press in a volume entitled Quantum Field Theory: from basics to modern topics.  

Organizing commitee: Brando Bellazzini, John Joseph Carrasco and Filippo Vernizzi

  Maxence Grandadam, en thèse sous la direction de Catherine Pépin , a été invité le 12 décembre 2018 à l'émission quotidienne de France Culture "la méthode scientifique", dans sa rubrique dédiée aux doctorants "La Recherche montre en Main" au cours de laquelle ils doivent exposer en 4 mn le sujet de leurs recherches. Giuliano Giacalone, étudiant sous la direction de Jean-Yves Ollitrault, a également été invité à s'exprimer à cette émission le mercredi 30 janvier 2019. Emission La Recherche Montre en Main Interview de Maxence Grandadam

The 23th Rencontres Claude Itzykson "Statistical Physics of Disordered and Complex Systems: A Tribute to Cirano De Dominicis" took place at IPhT on June 4 – 6, 2018. Our friend Cirano passed away in April 2017. The conference provided a unique opportunity to gather together former collaborators, colleagues and friends of Cirano De Dominicis, as well as younger researchers, who made significant contributions in the fields of Statistical Physics, in which Cirano had major impact:  Quantum Many-Body problem, dynamics of out of equilibrium systems, spin glasses and disordered systems.

Monica Guica (IPhT/CEA) et Eric Gourgoulhon (LUTh/Observatoire de Paris-Meudon) ont discuté de trous noirs (black holes) et de trous de vers (wormholes) dans l'épisode "Trous de ver, la porte des étoiles" de l'émission "La méthode scientifique" animée par Nicolas Martin sur France Culture. Vous pouvez la réécouter sur le podcast de l'émission .

IPhT will host a 4-week program on topological phases in condensed matter. The goal of this program, dubbed TopMat, is to gather some experts in the field interacting topological phases, such as fractional quantum Hall states or quantum spin liquids in magnets, to discuss the latest theoretical and experimental developments, and to favor informal discussions and new collaborations. This program will welcome more than 30 invited participants in total, most of them from abroad and staying for more than one week. A preliminary list of participants is available on https://topmat.sciencesconf.org/. The detail scientific program, with about two talks per day (open to every one), will be available soon. Scientific coordinators : Thierry Jolicoeur (LPTMS, Université Paris-Sud), Philippe Lecheminant (LPTM, Université de Cergy-Pontoise) and Grégoire Misguich (IPhT, CEA Saclay). TopMat is organized and funded in the framework of the project 'PSI2' of the Université Paris-Saclay.

The 23th Rencontres Claude Itzykson "Statistical Physics of Disordered and Complex Systems: A Tribute to Cirano De Dominicis" will be held at the Institut de Physique Théorique, CEA-Saclay, France, on June 4 – 6, 2018. Our friend Cirano passed away in April 2017. The conference will provide a unique opportunity to gather together former collaborators, colleagues and friends of Cirano De Dominicis, as well as younger researchers, who made significant contributions in the fields of Statistical Physics, in which Cirano had major impact:  Quantum Many-Body problem, dynamics of out of equilibrium systems, spin glasses and disordered systems.

Registration to the 2018 Beg Rohu summer school of statistical physics and condensed matter: Deep Learning and Statistical Physics is open. The deadline for application is the 25th of March. The school will take place from the 25th of June to the 7th of July 2018 at the French National Sailing School, on the peninsula of Quiberon in southern Brittany, France. Lectures: G. Ben Arous: Complexity of random landscapes, L. Bottou: Training Deep Networks with Stochastic Gradient Algorithms, J. Kurchan: Rugged phase-spaces and the dynamics within them, S. Mallat: Learning Physics with Multiscale Deep Neural Networks, M. Mézard: Statistical physics of inference, H. Sompolinsky: Statistical Mechanics of Deep Neural Networks and seminars by F. Krzakala and R. Zecchina.  Organizer: G. Biroli, corganizers: C. Cammarota and M.

IPhT will host a 4-week program on topological phases in condensed matter. The goal of this program, dubbed TopMat, is to gather some experts in the field interacting topological phases, such as fractional quantum Hall states or quantum spin liquids in magnets, to discuss the latest theoretical and experimental developments, and to favor informal discussions and new collaborations. TopMat is organized and funded in the framework of the project 'PSI2' of the Université Paris-Saclay. Scientific coordinators : Thierry Jolicoeur (LPTMS, Université Paris-Sud), Philippe Lecheminant (LPTM, Université de Cergy-Pontoise) and Grégoire Misguich (IPhT, CEA Saclay).

Dark Energy and Modified-Gravity cosmologies: DARKMOD   from September 11, 2017 to October 6, 2017 The acceleration of the expansion of the Universe at low redshifts has not received a satisfactory theoretical explanation yet. The value of a possible cosmological constant remains a puzzle and alternative approaches, dark energy or modified gravity, are still being developed. In view of the future observations by galaxy surveys, such as EUCLID for instance, it is timely to gather experts on both the theoretical aspects of dark energy and modified gravity, together with phenomenologists and observers. This 4-week workshop will provide an opportunity to discuss most aspects of both dark energy and modified gravity, from their theoretical construction to their link with observational cosmology. 

Our colleague Lenka Zdeborová co-organizes the Boulder Summer School 2017 on Frustrated and Disordered Systems, July 3-28, 2017. Giulio Biroli is one of the keynote invited lecturers. On of the main goals of this event is to bring to a broader physics audience the advanced mean-field methodology developed (in considerable part in IPhT) in the physics of disordered systems, such as the replica and cavity methods. Modern applications of these methods in soft-matter physics, jamming, but also computer science and biology will be also exposed.

The Itzykson Conference is held every year at the Institut de Physique Théorique in Saclay to honour the memory of Claude Itzykson. The 22nd edition of this conference, will take place on June 06-08, 2017 and will be devoted to the manipulation of simple quantum systems. Simple quantum systems, with few "effective" degrees of freedom, have a privileged place in our understanding of quantum mechanics because they are often found at the heart of the Gedanken experiments of the founding fathers. After a century of development of the field and technical progress, they are now implemented in many systems (quantum electrodynamics in cavity or in circuits, for example). Two-level systems, which are the simplest examples, are candidates to be the basic bricks, the qubits, of a future quantum computer.

Bertrand Duplantier, Ivan Kostov, Stéphane Ouvry, Vincent Pasquier, Hubert Saleur, Didina Serban, et Jonathan Belletête organisent une école d'été à Cargèse du 24 juillet au 4 août 2017. Vous trouverez toutes les informations sur le site: https://indico.in2p3.fr/event/14018/ N'hésitez pas à vous inscrire!  

A conference called "Qu'est ce que la gravité" will take place in our institute, amphi Bloch, on the 9-10 May 2017. Following the centenary of the theoretical discovery of gravitational waves by A. Einstein , and soon after their detection by the LIGO experiment, several aspects of General Relativity and gravitational physics will be reviewed. The scientific programme is availaible on the web site of the conference http://phbrax.wixsite.com/gravite We strongly recommend on-line registration for this event. Philippe Brax, Etienne Klein et Pierre Vanhove  

The Itzykson Conference is held every year at the Institut de Physique Théorique in Saclay to honour the memory of Claude Itzykson. The 22nd edition of this conference, will take place on June 06-08, 2017 and will be devoted to the manipulation of simple quantum systems. Simple quantum systems, with few "effective" degrees of freedom, have a privileged place in our understanding of quantum mechanics because they are often found at the heart of the Gedanken experiments of the founding fathers. After a century of development of the field and technical progress, they are now implemented in many systems (quantum electrodynamics in cavity or in circuits, for example). Two-level systems, which are the simplest examples, are candidates to be the basic bricks, the qubits, of a future quantum computer.