Targeted Simons Research Groups

Director: Benjamin Safdi, University of California, Berkeley

Principle Investigators:
Maria Baryakhtar, University of Washington
Adam Burrows, Princeton University
Francesca Calore, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique – Délégation DR11
Tobias Fischer, Wrocław University of Science and Technology

About:
The Targeted Simons Research Group on Axions aims to accelerate the discovery of the QCD axion, one of the most compelling candidates for the dark matter of the universe and the most elegant solution to a longstanding puzzle in particle physics known as the strong CP problem. Although the axion has eluded detection for decades because its interactions with ordinary matter are extraordinarily feeble, those interactions can be dramatically enhanced in the most extreme environments in the cosmos: core-collapse supernovae, neutron stars, and black holes. By integrating cutting-edge theoretical calculations with state-of-the-art astrophysical and cosmological simulations, the research group will, for the first time, self-consistently predict how axions would imprint themselves on the neutrinos, gravitational waves, gamma rays, and newly forged elements emerging from an exploding star. This program is urgent and timely, as a once-in-a-generation galactic supernova could occur at any moment. The theoretical groundwork performed here is essential to seize that fleeting opportunity, while also enabling complementary studies of axions in neutron-star cooling and black-hole superradiance. Computational studies of the axion’s origin in the early universe will sharpen the target mass for these axion searches and, more broadly, axion laboratory searches worldwide. Together, this work charts a path toward discovering the QCD axion across vast, otherwise inaccessible regions of its parameter space.
 

Director: Glennys Farrar, New York University

Principle Investigators:
Pallavi Bhat, International Centre for Theoretical Sciences
Susan Clark, Stanford University
Bryan Gaensler, University of California, Santa Cruz
Philip Hopkins, California Institute of Technology
Andrii Neronov, Université Paris Cité
Tanmay Vachaspati, Arizona State University

About:
The Targeted Simons Research Group on Cosmic Magnetism aims to bring together heretofore largely disconnected research efforts, to illuminate the origin, development, and present
distribution of magnetic fields in the universe. Initial projects will include: (1) analysis of all available magnetic-field-sensitive observables relevant to constraining the extragalactic
magnetic field in the Local Group; (2) analysis of new surveys of extragalactic Faraday rotation, to determine what can be deduced about the strength and coherence length of the magnetic field in nearby voids; (3) detailed, state-of-the-art MHD dynamo simulations to provide accurate sub-grid modeling of magnetic fields for galaxy simulations; (4) comparison of these sub-grid model results to observations of small scale turbulent fields in the Milky Way; (5) simulations of the evolution of the Milky Way’s magnetic field, taking into account its merger history, to understand whether a primordial field is needed to account for the observed structure and strength; and (6) numerical evolution of the magnetic field produced in the electroweak phase transition, to the epoch of galaxy formation.
 

Director: Manoj Kaplinghat, University of California, Irvine

Principle Investigators:
Alyson Brooks, Rutgers University
Francis-Yan Cyr-Racine, University of New Mexico
Benedikt Diemer, University of Maryland, College Park
Rouven Essig, Stony Brook University
Mariangela Lisanti, Princeton University
Ethan Nadler, University of California, San Diego
Laura Sales, University of California, Riverside
Paul Torrey, University of Virginia
Hai-Bo Yu, University of California, Riverside

Website:
http:/dmdynamics.org

About:
The dynamics of short-range interactions between dark matter particles can modify the formation, evolution, and structure of galaxies. The Targeted Simons Research Group on Dark Matter Dynamics will build the theoretical framework to translate concrete particle physics models of short-range forces into self-consistent and falsifiable predictions on galactic and sub-galactic scales, enabling the community to turn astronomical observations into tests of fundamental physics.
 

Director: Nima Arkani-Hamed, Institute for Advanced Study

Principle Investigators:
Luis Alday, University of Oxford
Benjamin Basso, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique – Délégation Paris-Centre
Jaroslav Trnka, University of California, Davis
Anastasia Volovich, Brown University

About:
The exact solutions of simple “toy models” have had an enormous impact on the development of fundamental physics. Newton discovered that planets orbit the sun in ellipses, a property which is due to the same magical hidden symmetries controlling the spectrum of the hydrogen atom. For the quantum theory of elementary particle interactions, the most natural toy model is a cousin theory of the strong interactions of quarks and gluons. This theory, which we call the quantum Rosetta stone or QRS (because its official name is a mouthful), has already been at the heart of a huge number of developments in theoretical physics. It provided the first example of a celebrated duality between gauge theory and string theory, and it has revealed startling new mathematical and physical structures underlying elementary particle scattering. QRS is believed to be controlled by a vast extension of the hidden symmetry seen in orbits and the hydrogen atom. The central goal of our collaboration is to solve QRS at arbitrary interaction strength for dynamical processes such as particle scattering, a solution that should reveal precisely how the quantum states at weak coupling — gluons — are “translated” into strings at strong coupling.
 

Director: Daniel Cristofaro-Gardiner, University of Maryland

Principle Investigators:
Alberto Abbondandolo, Ruhr University Bochum
Mohammed Abouzaid, Stanford University
Yakov Eliashberg, Stanford University
Helmut Hofer, Institute for Advanced Study
Michael Hutchings, University of California, Berkeley
Leonid Polterovich, Tel Aviv University
Sobhan Seyfaddini, ETH Zürich Foundation
Egor Shelukhin, University of Montreal

Website:
www.simonshamiltonian.com

About:
This project, lying at the crossroads of symplectic and contact topology and mathematical physics, aims to reshape our understanding of Hamiltonian dynamics and to push the subject beyond its traditional boundaries. It will investigate the mysterious algebraic and geometric structures of groups of symplectic and contact diffeomorphisms, which encode relationships among dynamical systems and unexpectedly combine features of Lie groups and hyperbolic groups. It will develop homological, homotopical, and categorical structures arising from dynamics and governed by moduli spaces of pseudoholomorphic curves. We will address long-standing open problems concerning periodic orbits, minimal invariant sets, Poincaré recurrence, and contact and Liouville dynamics, and develop applications to the topology of Liouville manifolds and thermodynamics. The grant will support graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, workshops, and research visits that foster collaboration, knowledge exchange, and the development of young researchers.
 

Director: Evgeniy Narimanov, Purdue University

Principle Investigator:
Dmitri Basov, Columbia University
Eugene Demler, ETH Zürich
Atac Imamoglu, ETH Zürich
John Schotland, Yale University

About:
This program will establish hyperbolic quantum matter as a new regime of quantum many-body physics, enabled by the ability of hyperbolic materials to confine electromagnetic fields to near-atomic length scales. By removing the conventional light–matter bottleneck, hyperbolic media lead to ultrastrong interactions between quantum emitters and photons in a solid-state platform. Direct access to these enhanced interactions will open the door to new quantum states, nonlinear optical effects, long-range entanglement, and architectures for quantum information processing and control of correlated materials.
 

Director: Caroline Morley, University of Texas at Austin

Principle Investigators:
Franziska Glassmeier, Max Planck Institute for Meteorology
Thaddeus Komacek, University of Oxford
Yamila Miguel, Leiden University
Jonathan Mitchell, University of California, Los Angeles
Paul Mollière, Max Planck Institute for Astronomy
Sarah Moran, University of Maryland, College Park
Diana Powell, University of Chicago
Emily Rauscher, University of Michigan

About:
From the clouds that shape Earth’s climate to the exotic clouds of rocks, salt, and molten metals found on distant exoplanets, clouds remain one of the greatest unsolved challenges in planetary science. The Simons Targeted Research Group on Multiscale Physics of Clouds Across Planetary Atmospheres unites researchers across Earth science, planetary science, and astrophysics to uncover the universal physics of clouds across worlds. By combining theory, advanced simulations, laboratory experiments, and observations from the James Webb Space Telescope and future observatories, the collaboration will build a new generation of cloud models that improve predictions of Earth’s changing climate while transforming our ability to understand planets beyond our solar system. Studying clouds in environments far more extreme than Earth provides an unprecedented laboratory for discovering the fundamental physics that governs atmospheres throughout the universe.
 

Director: Edwin Bergin, University of Michigan

Principle Investigators:
Geoffrey Blake, California Institute of Technology
Fred Ciesla, University of Chicago
Marc Hirschmann, University of Minnesota
Eliza Kempton, University of Chicago
Jie Li, University of Michigan
Diana Valencia, University of Toronto

Website:
https://organic-rich-worlds.org

About:
Carbon plays a foundational role in organic chemistry and as a regulator of planetary climate. Yet, compared to water, there is little exploration of its incorporation into potentially habitable planets that include the most common types in the galaxy: sub-Neptunes and super-Earths, alongside Earth analogs. This Targeted Simons Research Group comprises an integrated astro/geo-physical investigation that provides a synergistic focus on the supply of carbon to planetary systems. Our goal is to understand the true range of habitable systems that contain the essential components of life. We have isolated a major overlooked and under-studied ingredient: large macromolecular organics that we label as soot. These organics likely provided the needed material for life on our planet — and perhaps others. Our work has shown that soot-rich worlds likely exist to complement our own silicate-rich yet carbon-poor inhabited (i.e., life-fostering) world. Ultimately, this Simons Targeted Research Program will directly link evolving planet-forming disk thermochemistry to the atmospheric and surface compositions of exoplanets, with observable/testable predictions for disks and the planets they produce. We will investigate the geophysical evolution of organic-rich planetary interiors and their outgassing through pioneering high pressure/high temperature experiments. The end goal is a synergistic theoretical framework that will capture astrophysical signatures of the diverse geodynamic evolutionary pathways, shifting the paradigm of exoplanet composition and expand our concept of habitability, and better understand the context of our own planet.
 

Director: Senthil Todadri, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Principle Investigators:
Hart Goldman, University of Minnesota
Gabriel Kotliar, Rutgers University
Leonid Levitov, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Srinivas Raghu, Stanford University
Subir Sachdev, Harvard University
Qimiao Si, Rice University
Alex Thomson, University of California, Davis
Mengxing Ye, University of Utah

Website:
https://eqma.rice.edu/targeted-simons-research-group-strange-metals

About:
For decades, our understanding of the quantum physics of systems with many interacting degrees of freedom has been based on the notion of seemingly free particles. A crowning achievement in the 20th century is the development by Landau of the Fermi liquid (FL) theory that describes the low energy physics of a fluid of interacting fermions at a non-zero density in terms of electronic “quasiparticles. ” The quasiparticles share the statistics and quantum numbers of the underlying fermions but are distinct from them. Famously, this theory applies to mobile electrons in a metallic solid. Yet this “quasiparticle” paradigm breaks down in dealing with a growing number of challenges posed in modern quantum materials. Foremost among these are strange metals, the most prevalent and arguably the most confounding, which apparently lack quasiparticles of any kind.

The strange metal problem is rightly seen as one of the grand challenges in quantum condensed matter physics. Understanding the low-energy physics of such quantum many body systems in the absence of quasiparticles is not only a fundamental physics puzzle to be resolved for its own sake, but it is also very likely the key to understanding many other phenomena (such as the emergence of multiple “intertwined” ordered states at low temperature).

The goal of the Targeted Simons Research Group on Strange Metals is to establish a predictive theoretical framework for systems like strange metals where the quasiparticle concept fails. The group brings together researchers with expertise at every energy/length scale of the problem — from microscopic numerical methods to experimental phenomenology to field theoretic methods and long wavelength hydrodynamics — to intensely work towards this goal.
 

Director: Aditi Mitra, New York University

Principle Investigators:
Paul Fendley, University of Oxford
Lukasz Fidkowski, University of Washington
Sarang Gopalakrishnan, Princeton University
Isaac Kim, University of California, Davis
Sanjay Moudgalya, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research
Abhinav Prem, Bard College
Nathanan Tantivasadakarn, Stony Brook
Simon Trebst, University of Cologne
Dominic Williamson, University of Sydney

Website:
https://www.non-eq.com/

About:
Supported by a Simons Foundation Targeted Grant and directed by Aditi Mitra of New York University with co-director Paul Fendley of the University of Oxford, our project unites ten physicists across the United States, Europe, India, and Australia to build a comprehensive framework for quantum matter far from equilibrium. The equilibrium theory of matter is a triumph of modern physics, organizing collective phases through symmetry, topology, and universality. Yet the quantum systems now being built are driven, measured, and open to their environment; they lie outside equilibrium paradigms and exhibit forms of order with no static counterpart. Programmable quantum simulators realize such dynamics routinely, generating a fast-growing catalogue of phenomena that resist standard explanation. Our collaboration seeks the organizing principles behind this catalogue, extending the language of symmetry, topology, and entanglement to systems whose defining feature is that they never settle into equilibrium. The program spans the mathematical foundations of quantum dynamics, the classification of intrinsically dynamical phases of matter, the understanding of fault-tolerant quantum computation as itself a non-equilibrium phase of matter, and the nature of complexity in evolving quantum systems. Our aim is not merely to describe the dynamical world but to organize and ultimately predict it, laying the conceptual groundwork for the second century of quantum science.
 

Director: Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan, Harvard University

Principle Investigators:
Keenan Crane, Carnegie Mellon University
M. Lisa Manning, Syracuse University
Anuj Srivastava, Johns Hopkins University

About:
The Shape of Life aims to build a new quantitative science of biological form by combining the world’s fossil collections with modern biology, mathematics, physics, statistics, and computation. Building on catalogues of extinct diversity in museums and our understanding of developmental processes in extant organisms, the project will ask how living forms — e.g. skulls, bones, wings and leaves — change and diversify through evolution. Using a curated “atlas of shape,” the team will develop mathematical and computational models of developmental dynamics and plausible evolutionary transformations, with the ultimate goal of uncovering the physical and biological principles that govern the evolution of functional shape across deep time.
 

Director: Ivan Corwin, Columbia University

Principle Investigators:
Amol Aggarwal, Stanford University
Guillaume Barraquand, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique – Délégation Paris-Centre
Alexei Borodin, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Eric Corwin, University of Oregon
Jeremy Quastel, University of Toronto
Tomohiro Sasamoto, Institute of Science Tokyo

Website:
https://universalintegrability.github.io/

About:
Over the last twenty-five years, integrable probability has elucidated universal asymptotic behavior in a host of stochastic systems. By importing and developing new methods that rely on structures like the Yang–Baxter equation and symmetric function theory, researchers have begun to precisely characterize vast universality classes related to stochastic interface growth, interacting particle systems, random walks in random environments, and random tiling models.

The PIs of this targeted Simons research group have been at the forefront of these efforts. Over the duration of this grant, the PIs will build out the theory of universal scaling limits, especially in the presence of non-trivial boundary efforts; as well as broaden their attention to understanding how integrable probability can further be used to unify the study of quantum and classical integrable dynamical systems, both integrable and chaotic. This will include:

• Understanding how and why classical integrable systems control the transition probabilities and large deviations for models in integrable probability.
• Proving and expanding beyond physics predictions about the behavior of classical and quantum integrable systems start with random initial data
• Developing the nascent study of extreme diffusion by way of studying extreme behavior in random walks in random environments.