Targeted Simons Research Groups

Director: Benjamin Safdi, University of California, Berkeley

The group will accelerate the discovery of the quantum chromodynamics (QCD) axion by integrating state-of-the-art theoretical computations with astrophysical and cosmological simulations of core collapse supernovae, compact astrophysical objects and the early universe.
 

Director: Glennys Farrar, New York University

The group seeks to transform our understanding of magnetism across the epochs. They will take on problems, including whether the cosmic magnetic field originated in the electroweak phase transition or another early-universe epoch, the origin and evolution of magnetic fields in galaxies, voids, and clusters, and improving the treatment of magnetic fields and cosmic rays in numerical simulations of galaxy formation.
 

Director: Manoj Kaplinghat, University of California, Irvine

The group will build a theoretical framework to translate concrete particle physics models of short-range forces into self-consistent, falsifiable predictions on galactic and sub-galactic scales, enabling the community to turn observations into tests of fundamental interactions.
 

Director: Nima Arkani-Hamed, Institute for Advanced Study

The group aims to solve planar maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory exactly, for arbitrary values of the ’t Hooft coupling. The solution will provide unprecedented quantitative information on how the quantum states at weak coupling — gluons — smoothly transition into strings at strong coupling, within dynamical processes such as scattering amplitudes.
 

Director: Daniel Cristofaro-Gardiner, University of Maryland

This group’s work is at the crossroads of Hamiltonian dynamics, mathematical physics and symplectic and contact topology. The group will focus on uncovering the algebraic and geometric structures of symplectic and contact diffeomorphism groups, developing homological and categorical frameworks via pseudo-holomorphic curves and applying these tools to examine periodic orbits, dynamics beyond periodic orbits and non-equilibrium thermodynamics.
 

Director: Evgeniy Narimanov, Purdue University

This group aims to establish the theoretical foundations of Hyperbolic Quantum Matter — a new regime of quantum many-body physics enabled by the extreme anisotropy of hyperbolic materials. They will explore emergent quantum phases, non-equilibrium dynamics and long-range entanglement mediated by hyperbolic polaritons, with direct implications for quantum networks, sensing, metrology and computation.
 

Director: Caroline Morley, University of Texas at Austin

This group brings together a team of Earth scientists, planetary scientists and astrophysicists to improve our understanding of clouds. Through this collaboration, the group aims to significantly advance the state of climate science for Earth and other planets.
 

Director: Edwin Bergin, University of Michigan

The group is studying “water worlds” — rocky planets that may contain large amounts of water and, according to recent work, organic carbon. The group will develop the tools needed to make testable predictions of the origin, evolution, observable features and potential habitability of these carbon-bearing planets.
 

Director: Senthil Todadri, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The group studies strange metals, the most prevalent and arguably the most confounding examples of materials in which the quasiparticle paradigm breaks down. By combining quantum geometry, microscopic numerical methods and novel non-equilibrium probes, the group aims to establish a predictive theoretical framework for strange metals and related non-Fermi liquid systems.
 

Director: Aditi Mitra, New York University

This group will study quantum many-body systems far from equilibrium that reveal genuinely new phenomena with no static analog. The group seeks to build a unified mathematical and computational framework for systematically charting this non-equilibrium frontier.
 

Director: Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan, Harvard University

The group seeks to create a unifying quantitative framework for describing the shape of life in a way that connects development and evolution. The group seeks an answer to the question of how the development and evolution of functional biological shape can be described as constrained dynamics on a morphological manifold governed by geometry, physics and selection.
 

Director: Ivan Corwin, Columbia University

The group brings together mathematicians, theoretical physicists and experimentalists to unify classical, quantum and stochastic integrable systems to capture universal non-equilibrium phenomena. Through integrated research programs, the collaboration illuminates scaling limits and fluctuation behavior in complex systems ranging from quantum spin chains to extreme particle diffusion.