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
Jon Curtis, ETH Zurich
Mohammad Hafezi, University of Maryland
Yuxin Wang, University of Maryland

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

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

Organizers:

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

Organizers:

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

Organizers:

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

Organizers:

Julia Meyer, Université Grenoble-Alpes
Yuval Oreg, Weizmann Institute of Science
Gil Refael, California Institute of Technology

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.