* physicist in charge of diversity
** scientific advisor
Biophysics
January 1-6, 2023
Active
Matter in Complex Environments
Deadline to apply is
August 31, 2022
Organizers:
*Paulo Arratia, University of Pennsylvania
Moumita Das, Rochester Institute of
Technology
Sujit Datta, Princeton University
Cynthia Reichhardt, LANL
... not your typical
active matter conference.
Active matter is a
prominent area of research in soft matter
and biological physics: it gives us the
opportunity to learn new physics (active
materials are out of equilibrium),
engineer new materials (e.g.,
"intelligent" responsive materials), and
understand more about biology (e.g.,
cells, migratory animals, and even
subcellular motor proteins are active
materials). While a tremendous amount of
work has focused on the physics of active
matter in bulk/unconfined environments,
recent work is starting to demonstrate the
rich physics associated with active matter
in complex environments characterized by
tortuosity, confinement, and complex
interactions. In these cases,
environmental interactions can strongly
impact motility behaviors and collective
phenomena like flocking, clustering, and
phase separation. This Aspen Winter
Conference will focus on this new
direction in active matter research at the
interface of soft matter physics,
statistical and nonlinear physics,
biology, and engineering. On the
experimental side, recent advances have
enabled direct visualization and
characterization of active matter behavior
in models of complex biological, natural,
and engineering environments. These
advances are motivating the development of
new theories and methods that can harness
the output of these new tools. On the
theoretical and computational side, recent
advances have enabled more efficient
computation of active matter behavior in
complex environments over a wide variety
of length and time scales. These models
are now finding use in the diverse
settings described above. Due to these
recent advances, an explosion of work is
ongoing in this topic.
This Conference will
bring together a diverse group of leading
theorists and experimentalists working on
such problems across this rapidly
developing field, in a wide range of
systems and over a wide range of scales.
Our ultimate goal is to foster new
collaborations, clarify unifying/open
questions for future research to address,
and brainstorm new directions for the
field that cut across physics, biology,
materials, engineering, and other
disciplines. We will focus on five
different themes:
Fundamentals of active matter in
complex environments,
Collective behaviors,
Interactions with complex fluids,
Active matter through the lens of
Biology and vice versa
Organizers:
Steven Block, Stanford University
*Thomas Perkins, JILA
This will be the 11th
biennial workshop on Single Molecule
Biophysics (SMB) held at the Aspen Center
for Physics (ACP), building on a
successful series begun in 2001. The SMB
meeting highlights recent progress in the
field of single molecule biophysics, on
both its experimental and theoretical
frontiers. Topics vary
somewhat from year to year. Biological
systems covered in past meetings have
included nucleic acid-based enzymes
(polymerases, topoisomerases, helicases,
etc.), nucleic acids (DNA, RNA),
mechanoenzymes (myosin, kinesin, dynein,
ATP synthase, flagellar motors), and
aspects of molecular physiology (folding/
unfolding, binding, signaling, and other
biostructural changes). Featured
experimental techniques have included
advanced fluorescence, optical trapping,
magnetic tweezers, scanned-probe
microscopy, nanopores and super‑resolution
techniques. This workshop traditionally
attracts an admixture of experimentalists
and theorists. Biologists and physicists
with either newfound or longstanding
interests in biophysics are strongly
encouraged to apply: all levels of
accomplishment are welcome. The meeting
strives for a lively mix of students and
professors. The SMB workshop has been
oversubscribed in the past, so a higher
priority will be assigned to those
applicants presenting important new
findings and who commit to remain for the
duration of the meeting. In the event of
oversubscription, a limit of two
representatives from each participating
scientific group or collaboration will be
adopted. We attempt to award each group or
collaboration one short talk based on the
applications accepted. All attendees are
also invited to present posters.
Prospective participants should submit the
following:
A short abstract (<200 words) of
the proposed contribution, and be sure
to include a title along with the
names and institutional affiliations
of all co-authors. The submitted
abstracts will be ranked and used as a
basis for admission.
Indicate if you wish the abstract to
be considered for a talk. Otherwise, a
poster presentation will be assumed.
Indicate that you intend to attend
the full meeting, if admitted. If a
partial attendance is anticipated,
please be sure to supply the reason in
your application.
Funding raised has traditionally been used
to defray expenses for qualifying
participants, especially younger
scientists and those traveling a long
distance. We plan to maintain this
tradition. In addition, one junior
applicant will receive a merit-based award
from the Block Scholarship fund, and also
be given a talk at the meeting.
Organizers:
Susan N. Coppersmith, University of New
South Wales
*Jeremy Levy, University of Pittsburgh
David Pekker, University of Pittsburgh
While simulation of
quantum problems with classical computers
has revolutionized fields like chemistry,
materials science, condensed matter and
nuclear physics, successful implementation
of quantum algorithms has the potential to
yield enormous additional computational
capabilities for studying complex quantum
systems. Over the past several decades
there has been considerable progress in
the development of quantum hardware.
Currently, state of the art quantum
machines, both analog and digital, are at
the threshold where the computational
power of these machines is about to exceed
that of conventional computers.
At this Aspen Winter Conference, we will
bring together people working on
state-of-the-art quantum hardware, both
analog and digital, with leading
theoretical physicists in order to explore
how to harness the power of quantum
computers for solving a broad range of
hard quantum problems. The meeting will
foster collaborations by exploring what
can be done with the current generation of
quantum hardware, identifying quantum
problems/models which may be solvable
using quantum hardware in the future, and
determining how to optimize quantum
hardware for solving physics problems.
Organizers:
Adam Brown, Stanford University &
Google
Ethan Dyer, Google
**Paul Ginsparg, Cornell University
*Guy Gur-Ari, Google
Maithra Raghu, Samaya AI
Machine learning is undergoing a
scientific revolution, with a succession
of experimental triumphs. These empirical
successes have often led to, and sometimes
been inspired by, improved theoretical
understanding that leans heavily on
insight from physics. This Aspen Winter
Conference will investigate the use of
ideas from theoretical physics---in
particular, high energy theory, condensed
matter theory, and statistical
mechanics---to better understand machine
learning. We will bring together
researchers from the theoretical physics
and machine learning communities to
discuss the physics of ML, with an eye
towards both improved performance and
progress on new challenges.
Organizers:
*Suvi Gezari, Space Telescope Science
Institute
Andrea Ghez, University of California Los
Angeles
Fred Rasio, Northwestern University
Steinn Sigurdsson, Pennsylvania State
University
In the spirit of the
Aspen X-games, this conference will
highlight the astrophysics of “eXtreme
black holes”, across the entire mass range
from stellar to supermassive, covering a
broad variety of environments (interacting
binaries, dense star clusters, galactic
nuclei), and observable signatures
(gravitational waves, very high energy
neutrinos, high-resolution imaging, time
domain). This conference is a third
in a series of Aspen Winter conferences in
black hole astrophysics, but with a new
focus on the breakthroughs in
multi-messenger observations of black
holes, and observations and theory that
probe the extremes of their
demographics.
Many recent discoveries
in gravitational wave observations of
black hole binaries, recent associations
of very high energy neutrinos with
accreting supermassive black holes, large
samples of tidal disruption events from
all-sky time domain surveys, new
capabilities for X-ray monitoring of X-ray
binaries and active galactic nuclei, and
the first radio interferometric images of
a central black hole in M87 and our own
Milky Way, as well as theoretical
developments in black hole binary
formation channels, and numerical
simulations of black hole formation and
galaxy-black hole coevolution, make 2023
an exciting time for this meeting.
Topics covered by the
meeting include:
Time domain
observations of accreting black holes
of all mass scales across the
electromagnetic spectrum
New window on the
stellar-mass black hole mass function
from gravitational wave detections by
LIGO and Virgo
Shedding light on
dormant black holes in galaxy nuclei
with observations of tidal disruption
events
Hydrodynamics of
collisions, mergers, and tidal
disruptions
Signatures of black
hole growth through mergers
from binary black holes and recoiling
massive black holes
Studying the
accretion flow of a black hole from
the smallest (the event horizon) to
largest scales (relativistic jets)
Evidence for
intermediate-mass black holes, and
their implications for the nature of
black hole seeds
Organizers:
Jennifer Cano, Stonybrook University
Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, MIT
Jie Shan, Cornell University
*Ali Yazdani, Princeton University
The advent of moiré
quantum materials has opened an entirely
new highly tunable platform for exploring
the interplay between electronic
structure, interactions, symmetry, and
topology. Starting with the discovery of
correlated insulator states and
superconductivity in magic angle twisted
bilayer graphene, a growing variety of
moiré systems have emerged, resulting in
many novel correlated and topological
phenomena, including new quantum anomalous
Hall systems, generalized Wigner crystals,
and integer and fractional Chern
insulators, among others. This rich
phenomenology has attracted enormous
theoretical attention and, simultaneously,
the interest of the entire repertoire of
experimental condensed matter techniques
to deepen our understanding of these
exotic phases.
This conference will
bring together the broad community of
researchers interested in all these topics
of moiré materials. We aim to have a
healthy mix of experimentalists and
theorists and will recruit high quality
speakers in all of the topics mentioned
above (see below). Finally, as the
progress in the field is very fast, a few
slots will be reserved for breaking news
related to the conference topics.
Organizers:
Elisabeth Adams, Planetary Science
Institute
Brian Jackson, Boise State University
*Melinda Soares-Furtado, University of
Wisconsin Madison
Andrew Vanderburg, MIT
The growing population
of exoplanets and the expanding repertoire
of instruments and analysis techniques
have moved the astrophysical domain of
exoplanets from an era of individual
system discoveries to a golden age of
population-level scientific advances. With
new and expected instruments and methods,
we can examine the entire life cycles of
planets and planetary systems. This Aspen
Winter Conference will bring together
leading scientific experts to explore the
relationship between exoplanet
demographics, stellar evolution, and
stellar dynamics. The conference will
focus on late-stage exoplanetary systems,
including evolved stars and white dwarf
hosts. Conference attendees will address
and summarize what these relationships
reveal about the underlying processes of
the formation and evolution of planetary
systems.
In this one-week,
interdisciplinary workshop, we will bring
together experts in time-domain astronomy,
dynamics, stellar evolution, stellar
rotation, asteroseismology, and planetary
science to address two major open
questions related to late-stage
exoplanetary systems
What can we learn
about planet formation and evolution
from the demographics of exoplanets
orbiting post-main-sequence stars?
What can we learn about the chemical
history and bulk planetary composition
from accretion signatures and post-MS
planetary ingestion investigations?
Organizers:
*Wolfgang Altmannshofer, University of
California Santa Cruz
Patrick Fox, Fermilab
Stefania Gori, University of California
Santa Cruz
David Shih, Rutgers University
Mike Williams, MIT
We have entered a new
and exciting decade of particle physics.
The field of Beyond the Standard Model
(BSM) physics has rapidly transformed into
a diverse program of new physics (NP)
searches, including: high-pT searches at
the LHC; precision tests of the SM,
especially in the Higgs and flavor
sectors; searches for new light particles
at high-intensity experiments; and direct
and indirect searches for Dark Matter
across an increasingly broad range of
masses and couplings. In addition,
exciting developments in the field of
machine learning are inspiring new and
innovative methods to search for NP across
this broad program.
The goal of this Aspen
Winter Conference is to bring together
theorists and experimentalists, both to
discuss the latest experimental results in
all of these areas and their various
theoretical implications, as well as to
explore novel techniques for the future
exploration of BSM physics, including the
prospects for NP searches at the
High-Luminosity LHC and future colliders.
Key topics that will be covered include:
results from the first run of the Belle II
flavor factory; the status of the flavor
anomalies; new ideas to probe Dark Matter
and dark sectors; direct and indirect
searches for new physics at high energy
experiments; precision measurements at
small scale high-intensity experiments,
e.g. g-2 and rare kaon decay experiments;
and machine learning in particle physics.
