Summer Workshops

The Center encourages physicists from distant institutions to meet for intensive research interaction. Separate from the workshops, small informal collaborations of two to six physicists are encouraged and efforts are made to accommodate such Working Groups. Learn more about working groups here.

Physicists are encouraged to apply as individual researchers to work on their own projects for up to five weeks at any time during the summer. We provide a serene atmosphere to complete work. The individual researcher may also choose to attend any workshop meetings or chat with other scientists in residence in addition to working on his or her own research.

One component of the Center program is unstructured and concentrates on individual research and the informal exchange of ideas. About 500 physicists and astrophysicists from about 100 institutions participate in the Center's summer program, with 80-90 in residence at any time. (About 40% of the participants attend for the first time.) The research interests of the participants cover a number of fields, including astrophysics, biophysics, condensed matter physics, dynamical systems, elementary particle physics, mathematical physics, and statistical physics. The interactions between participants with different interests and backgrounds are one of the most stimulating aspects of the program. Applicants can be sure that colleagues from other sub-fields of physics will be present throughout the summer.

The original concept for the Center was for individual research. Due to demands by funding agencies and academic institutions, the program has developed with specific workshops at the core. Yet, the Center continues to offer desks to applicants who apply to come to do their own research. When completing your summer application, choose Individual Research rather than a particular workshop. Applicants in this category are given as much consideration as those applying for a workshop.

Organizers:

Daniel Agterberg, University of Wisconsin
Haim Beidenkopf , Weizmann Institute
Erez Berg, UC Santa Barbara
Elena Hassinger, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

Organizers:

Peter Armitage, Johns Hopkins University
*Kenneth Burch, Boston College
Jon Curtis, ETH Zurich
Mohammad Hafezi, University of Maryland
Yuxin Wang, University of Maryland

*scientific advisor

Quantum materials are defined by correlations—between spins, charges, orbitals, valleys, phonons, and photons—yet many of the most important correlations are invisible to conventional probes. Neutron and x-ray scattering, ARPES, STM, optical conductivity, and transport have transformed condensed matter physics, but they mostly access response functions averaged over space, ensembles, or limited operator channels. Quantum sensing may offer a fundamentally different capability: its coherence, entanglement, squeezing, or photon statistics can provide access to correlation functions, fluctuations, and nonlinear material responses inaccessible to classical measurements.

This workshop will bring together three communities that have so far interacted only partially: nanoscale spin-based quantum sensing, quantum-light-enabled spectroscopy, and optical correlation measurements in quantum materials. The unifying question is: What new many-body observables become measurable when the probe itself is quantum? The goal is to define the emerging field of quantum-enabled materials spectroscopy, identify the correlation functions accessible in realistic platforms, and build collaborations among quantum information scientists, AMO physicists, condensed-matter experimentalists, and many-body theorists.

Organizers:

Kim V. Berghaus, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
Marc Kamionkowski, Johns Hopkins University
Soubhik Kumar, Tufts University
Rashmish K. Mishra , Harvard University

The coming decade will deliver an unprecedented influx of precision cosmological data from the cosmic microwave background, large-scale structure, 21-cm line-intensity mapping, and gravitational waves, creating an urgent need to connect theoretical mechanisms with observational signatures. This workshop plans to bring together experts in quantum field theory (QFT), lattice simulations, and cosmological data analysis to address a critical gap: the limited cross-talk between theory- and data-driven communities working on early Universe physics. Participants will focus on three interconnected challenges — obtaining precision predictions from first-principles QFT mechanisms across perturbative and non-perturbative regimes, applying these to resolve cosmological tensions, and developing statistical techniques, including ML/AI tools, to uncover subtle new physics signatures. By fostering dialogue across these communities, the workshop aims to build the foundations for a coherent theoretical and observational program as we enter the era of precision cosmology.

Organizers:

Scott Collier, Syracuse University
Jordan Cotler , Harvard University
Tom Hartman, Stanford University
Kristan Jensen, University of Victoria

Over the past few years, several independent developments have converged on a compelling picture: in quantum gravity, the gravitational path integral computes coarse-grained statistical information about the microscopic data of the underlying quantum theory. This idea has been made precise in several arenas: spacetime wormholes encode the statistics of black hole microstates; solvable models of low-dimensional string theory are exactly dual to random matrix ensembles; and the sum over topologies in three-dimensional gravity computes the moments of an ensemble of conformal field theory data. Since these examples are either anchored by asymptotic boundary conditions or made tractable by exact solvability, it remains an important open question how far the statistical paradigm extends beyond these controlled settings, and how it can be connected in detail to the UV completion. Cosmology gives an even more direct motivation, because the gravitational path integral computes a wavefunction of the universe whose physical predictions are intrinsically probabilistic. This workshop will bring together researchers from quantum gravity, conformal field theory, quantum cosmology and quantum chaos to take stock of this emerging statistical paradigm and to form new collaborations to confront its open problems.

Organizers:

Lukasz Fidkowski, University of Washington
Jeongwan Haah, Stanford University
Daniel Ranard, California Institute of Technology

Quantum many-body systems on a lattice can exhibit remarkably rich forms of order, entanglement, and symmetry. While many of these phenomena have traditionally been understood through continuum quantum field theory, recent progress has shown that an intrinsically lattice-based perspective can reveal new structures. These developments include quantum cellular automata as a framework for generalized symmetries and their anomalies, fracton phases that lie beyond traditional descriptions of topological order, and the “entanglement bootstrap,” which seeks to characterize phases of matter directly from universal properties of quantum entanglement.  This workshop will bring together researchers in condensed matter physics, quantum information, quantum field theory, and mathematical physics to develop connections among these rapidly evolving directions. A central goal will be to understand how new notions of symmetry, locality, and entanglement can provide a unified framework for classifying quantum phases and dynamics directly on the lattice.

Organizers:

Stefania Gori, University of California Santa Cruz
Claudio Andrea Manzari, Institute for Advanced Study
Christopher G. Tully, Princeton University
Weishuang Linda Xu, SLAC National Accelerator Lab

The origin of the electroweak scale, the strong CP problem, the flavor structure of matter, and the nature of dark matter remain among the deepest open questions in particle physics, and a new generation of collider searches, precision laboratory experiments, and cosmological surveys is now converging on testing overlapping regions of parameter space. This workshop brings together theorists and experimentalists to collaborate in two synergistic directions: the top-down construction of theoretically motivated models to serve as concrete benchmarks for upcoming experiments, and the bottom-up identification of specific new physics targets that are within reach of the experimental data. By bringing together model builders and experimentalists, we aim to sharpen theoretical benchmarks that can guide the design and interpretation of next-generation searches, poised at the dawn of HL-LHC, the Belle-II upgrade, Rubin, and SO.

Organizers:

Uros Delic, Vienna University of Technology
Wolfgang Ketterle, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Dan Stamper-Kurn, University of California Berkeley

The three-week workshop, Fundamental Quantum Physics with Small Systems, aims to bring together researchers working on the physics of systems containing only a small number of quantum degrees of freedom. These include few-body atomic and molecular systems; photons in waveguides, single- or multimode cavities; mechanical oscillators; mesoscopic electronic systems such as quantum dots or Coulomb-blockaded circuits; spins, color centers and defects in solids; superconducting circuits; and hybrid quantum platforms. Although these systems differ substantially in their physical implementation, they raise many common questions. How do entanglement, correlations, and collective behavior emerge in few-body systems? Which aspects of quantum dynamics are universal and platform-independent? How do measurement, dissipation, and structured environments shape quantum behavior? How do non-Hermitian, directional/chiral, nonreciprocal phenomena, or cascaded systems arise and influence dynamics in open quantum systems? Beyond exploring these questions, the workshop will provide a setting for exchange across traditionally separate communities and for formulating new experimental and theoretical directions in fundamental quantum physics.

Organizers:

Vijay Balasubramanian, University of Pennsylvania
Armita Nourmohammad, Yale University
Greg Stephens, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Lenka Zdeborová, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have driven striking progress across the sciences from the prediction of protein structures to the design of novel materials and the discovery of new proofs in mathematics. Such advances are especially consequential for problems that are high-dimensional and analytically intractable, as in the biological sciences. Yet a central question remains: how do data-driven AI methods that prioritize prediction over interpretation, complement the physics-style inquiry that, over the past centuries, has revealed the organizing principles of the natural world, and that has recently begun to uncover such principles in living systems? A growing body of work suggests that it may be possible to constrain ML and AI models with physical structure and reasoning to yield interpretable models that both describe existing data, and generalize to novel settings because they are appropriately grounded. This workshop convenes researchers across the subfields of biological physics who are developing such physics-informed Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods for biological discovery. We will examine the benefits and limits of different approaches, and discuss how to develop methods that draw simultaneously on the strengths of two complementary approaches: (a) encoding what we believe we understand about a system through the mathematical methods of physics, and (b) learning the system directly from data through ML and AI methods, while incorporating physical constraints.

Organizers:

Adelie Gorce, Université Paris-Saclay
Julian Munoz, University of Texas-Austin
Joaquin Vieira, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Jessica Zebrowski, University of Chicago

This workshop will bring the line-intensity mapping (LIM) community together at Aspen to tackle the theoretical and observational challenges and opportunities of this quickly maturing field. LIM maps the integrated light of galaxies rather than resolving individual objects, which allows it to survey larger areas, reach fainter objects, and probe earlier times than traditional galaxy surveys. The field is at an inflection point. Experiments such as SPHEREx, HERA, MeerKAT, CHIME, COMAP, TIME, and TIM are spearheading observations, yet our theories are not ready to interpret the coming data, and the community has not converged on the best design for the next generation of experiments. The program will gather theorists and experimentalists across communities and wavelengths to (i) build the theoretical foundations of the field, (ii) guide the design and systematics mitigation of next-generation experiments, and (iii) connect both sides to unveil the faint and far early Universe.

Organizers:

Herschel Chawdhry, Florida State University
Manfred Kraus, University of Mexico (IF-UNAM)
Laura Reina, Florida State University
David Shih, Rutgers University

The remarkable precision achieved by frontier experiments such as the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the LIGO--Virgo--KAGRA gravitational-wave observatories have placed unprecedented demands on theoretical predictions. Extracting the full scientific potential of present and future facilities, including the High-Luminosity (HL) LHC, requires continued advances in perturbative quantum field theory, scattering amplitudes, resummation, Monte Carlo event generation, and numerical techniques for multi-loop calculations. At the same time, rapid progress in artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum information (QI) is creating new opportunities to rethink how these calculations are performed, potentially overcoming longstanding computational bottlenecks and enabling qualitatively new approaches. This workshop will bring together researchers from precision collider phenomenology, formal quantum field theory, machine learning, and quantum information science to explore these emerging opportunities. The Aspen environment is uniquely suited to fostering interactions between communities that do not traditionally overlap but nevertheless face common computational challenges. Our goal is to identify new methods, stimulate interdisciplinary collaborations, and accelerate the development of techniques that will advance precision calculations for current and future experiments.

Organizers:

Immanuel Bloch, Munich Center for Quantum Science and Technology
Julia Meyer, Université Grenoble-Alpes
Yuval Oreg, Weizmann Institute of Science
Gil Refael, California Institute of Technology

Can advances in quantum materials and collective quantum phenomena unlock fundamentally new capabilities for quantum technologies? Recent progress already offers inspiring examples: Rydberg atoms in optical tweezer arrays for quantum computing, ultracold atoms in optical lattices as quantum simulators of strongly correlated matter, Josephson junctions as quantum-limited amplifiers, and NV centers for quantum sensing. Yet major challenges remain, and emerging quantum materials and engineered many-body systems offer opportunities not only to overcome current limitations, but also to enable functionalities that have yet to be imagined.

This workshop brings together researchers from condensed matter physics, AMO physics, quantum materials, and quantum technologies to explore how new discoveries in quantum matter can inspire the next generation of quantum platforms and devices. Quantum simulation with ultracold atoms exemplifies this exchange: many-body phenomena from condensed matter are recreated and probed with single-site resolution, while the control techniques developed along the way feed directly into quantum technologies. Our goals are to identify promising directions, stimulate cross-disciplinary collaborations, and strengthen the dialogue between fundamental discoveries and technological challenges.

Organizers:

Geeta Narlikar, University of California-San Francisco
Krishna Shrinivas, Northwestern University
Ned S. Wingreen, Princeton University
Yaojun Zhang, Johns Hopkins University

Organizers:

Bret Lehmer, University of Arkansas
Ilya Mandel, Monash University
Lidia Oskinova, University of Potsdam
Daniel Schaerer, University of Geneva

Why do so many star-forming galaxies show evidence of ions with high ionisation potential, indicating the presence of hard radiation? The nature of the sources of this hard radiation remain unclear, yet they hold the key to understanding underlying physical processes such as accretion onto black holes, shocks, efficient mixing in massive stars, star formation, stellar winds, interactions between pairs of companion stars, and supernovae.  We invite theorists, computational modellers, and observers across stellar, extragalactic, X-ray, and the high-redshift astrophysics to discuss solutions to this acute problem.