The retreat of the Institute of Theoretical Physics was held in Autrans (Vercors) from May 23 to 25.

The approximately one hundred participants enjoyed the benefits of the altitude and the gorgeous environment surrounding the Escandille congress center, which hosted the event. This intense and joyful retreat provided an opportunity to strengthen the cohesion between members of our laboratory and to discuss among ourselves issues of science and the life of the Institute.

The IPhT is characterized by a broad spectrum of research topics. In order to highlight the skills and to pedagogically transmit the knowledge to other non-expert colleagues, 7 scientific presentations of IPhT researchers were organized, complemented by 2 presentations held by external speakers, Professors Luc Blanchet (Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris, long-term visitor at IPhT) and Emil Martinec (University of Chicago).

Short presentations allowed the new PhD students and post-doctoral fellows of the IPhT to be known by the other researchers. The IT and administrative support teams took the opportunity to present their work to everyone and gave us a lot of useful information. The traditional open discussion session "on the future of the laboratory" allowed the participants to exchange on multiple questions of the laboratory life.

A quiz game then tested the knowledge of the participants on various subjects: the CEA, the CNRS, the history of the IPhT, general physics or even on key publications of members of our lab. The random distribution of seats in the restaurant allowed to vary the guests, thus breaking the barriers of age, language, skills, etc. To keep fit and reinforce the team atmosphere, walks in the green nature were proposed to the participants, in addition to the sports facilities of the center (swimming pool, gym, sauna, ping-pong). Last but not least, the last evening was celebrated with a dance party that added a fun touch to this busy retreat!
 

We are pleased to announce that Ben Wieder will arrive at the IPhT at the end of September 2022 on the position of permanent junior researcher.

Benjamin Wieder completed his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania with Charlie Kane in 2016.He was then a postdoc in Andrei Bernevig's group at Princeton University. He is currently a postdoc at MIT, working with T. Senthil among others. He is a theoretical physicist of condensed matter and more specifically of electronic properties in materials with topologically non-trivial band structure. He has worked on the combined aspects of geometry and topology in materials with complex nodal surfaces. He then studied the relationships between energy band connectivity of solids, structural chirality, topology and magnetism.

He collaborated with Zahid Hasan's group at Princeton to identify candidate materials with these new properties. He is a member of a collaboration whose goal is to classify all existing topological structures in real materials. He will bring new expertise to the IPhT in this rapidly growing field.

Welcome to Ben in our laboratory!

We are pleased to announce that Dalimil Mazáč will join the IPhT as a CEA Permanent Researcher as of August 1, 2023.

Dalimil prepared his thesis at the Perimeter Institute under the supervision of Davide Gaiotto, he then did a first postdoc at the SCGP at Stony Brook before joining the IAS at Princeton where he will stay until he will join our Institute. During his thesis, Dalimil wrote a paper on Analytic Bounds
and Emergence of AdS2 Physics from the Conformal Bootstrap which raised a lot of interest, as he introduced the notion of analytic functional
crucial to obtain rigorous bounds in the conformal bootstrap framework. Even more remarkably, his approach is in fact equivalent to Viazovska's solution of the optimal sphere stacking problem in dimension 8, as Dalimil discovered in later developments.

Since then, he has been interested in applications of analytic functionals to quantum gravity, and is currently exploring the relations between conformal theories and spectral properties of hyperbolic varieties. Dalimil will bring his expertise to the mathematical physics certainly also have fruitful interactions with the other groups. We are delighted with this hiring which will contribute greatly to the dynamics of the laboratory.