Yale Physics research represented at 2026 APS Global Physics Summit

The 2026 American Physical Society (APS) Global Physics Summit was held in Denver, Colorado from March 15-20. This conference brought together scientists from around the world and from across all disciplines of physics to showcase their work, connect with others, and discover groundbreaking physics research. The theme of this year’s conference was “Science for a Shared Future.” 

Yale Physics was well-represented at the conference, with several members of the physics department presenting research or chairing sessions.  Please see below for additional information.

Special Session featuring the Nobel Laureates

• Michel Devoret, Frederick W. Beinecke Professor Emeritus in Applied Physics, From macroscopic quantum phenomena to superconducting artificial atoms

Invited Talks & Panels

• Helen Caines, Horace D. Taft Professor of Physics, Recreating the First Microsecond: What Heavy-Ion Collisions Reveal About the Universe’s Secrets [Session APR-L74: Nuclear Physics in the Lab and in Society, invited speaker]

• Meng Cheng, assistant professor of physics, Ordering topological orders in quantum Hall systems and beyond (co-authors: Seth Musser, Senthil Todadri, Nathan Seiberg, Amir Raz) [Session MAR-G13: Anyonic Quantum Matter]

• Sarah Demers, professor of physics and physics department chair, EVW-L02 AI Town Hall: A Conversation on the Future of Physics and AI

• Prakhar Garg, research scientist, Design and Performance Overview of the ePIC Detector at the EIC [Session MAR-G20: Detectors and Instrumentation for Nuclear Physics]

• Laura Havener, assistant professor, Jet Quenching at the LHC [Session APR-R76: Jet Quenching in the Quark-Gluon Plasma from RHIC to the LHC]

• Yogesh Patil, research scientist, Magnetically Levitated Drops of Superfluid Helium: Measuring Brownian Motion and Optical Backaction [Session MAR-W29: Optomechanics]

• A. Douglas Stone, Carl A. Morse Professor of Applied Physics and professor of physics, Stages in the Conceptual Development of Wave Mechanics [Session APR-H83: Pais Prize]

Session chairs

• Caines, Jet Quenching in the Quark-Gluon Plasma from RHIC to the LHC

• Demers, Physics of Particle Flavor

• Matthew Leighton, Mossman Fellow, Nonequilibrium Statistical Physics

• Stone, The Crisis in American Science

Contributed session presenters

• Michael Abbott, associate research scientist, What can be expressed while allowing physical learning? (co-author: Ben Machta) [Session MAR-G58: Physics of Learning and Adaptation I]

• Daniil Antonenko, postdoctoral associate, Neural Wavefunctions for Interacting Bosons (co-authors: Leonid Glazman, Liang Fu) [Session MAR-P34: Quantum Fluid Dynamics Across Bosonic and Electronic Platforms]

• David Carcamo, graduate student, Emergence of criticality in high-dimensional neural activity (co-author: Christopher Lynn) [Session MAR-M62: Statistical and Dynamical Physics of the Brain]

• Kathleen (Katie) Chang, graduate student, Fold-transversal surface code cultivation (Part 2) (co-authors: Pei-Kai Tsai, Kaavya Sahay, Qile Su, Thomas Smith, Shraddha Singh, Shruti Puri [Session MAR-A09: Constructions for universal gates and magic states]

• Gautham Gopinath, graduate student, Deformable Particle Modeling Reveals How Cell Shape Dynamics Govern Collective Cell Motion (co-authors: Emmanuel Mintah, Corey O’Hern, Mark D. Shattuck) [Session MAR-S58: Mechanics of Cells and Tissues IV]

• Aaron Greenberg, graduate student, Investigating the Momentum Structure of Superconductivity via Quasiparticle Interference in CsV3Sb5 using Scanning Tunneling Microscopy: Part 1 (co-authors: Xinze Yang, Eduardo Da Silva Neto, Pranab Kumar Nag, Kirsty Scott, Yi Jiang, Junze Deng, Chandra Shekhar, Claudia Felser, Santiago Blanco-Canosa, Andrei Bernevig, Dong Chen [Session MAR-C31: Superconductivity on the Kagome Lattice]

• Pranav Kantroo, postdoctoral associate, Network architecture can shape in-context learning (co-author: Ben Machta) [Session MAR-L63: Statistical Physics Meets Machine Learning I]

• Claire Laffan, graduate student, Results from Axion Search with HAYSTAC  (co-authors: Aarav Sindhwad, Maria Simanovskaia, Karl van Bibber, Xiran Bai, Reina Maruyama, Michael Jewell) [Session APR-V89: Physics of Axions III]

• Matthew Leighton, Mossman Fellow, Decomposing non-Markovian History Dependence (co-author: Christopher Lynn) [Session MAR-U57: Physics of Learning and Adaptation III]

• Matthew Leighton, Mossman Fellow, Stochastic Thermodynamics and Interference for Nonequilibrium Cooling [Session MAR-A62: Noise-Driven Dynamics in Far-From-Equilibrium Systems I]

• Siddhant Mehrotra, graduate student, Optical Trapping of Xenon for Beyond Standard Model Physics Searches  (co-authors: Lucas Darroch, David Moore) [Session APR-C81: Quantum Sensors and Tests of Fundamental Physics I]

• Allen Mi, graduate student, High performance simulation-decoding framework for erasure-aware quantum error correction (co-authors: James Teoh, Robert Schoelkopf, Steven Girvin) [Session MAR-B16: Dual-Rail and Erasure Qubit Applications]

• Xiaowei Ou, graduate student, Improving neural network performance for solving quantum sign structure (co-authors: Tianshu Huang, Vidvuds Ozolins) [Session MAR-U46: Quantum Many-Body Systems and Methods II]

• Carlton Smith, graduate student, Global and local preferential attachment in faculty hiring (co-author: Christopher Lynn) [Session MAR-J62: Statistical Physics of Networks and Complex Social Systems]

• Nemin Wei, Yale Postdoctoral Prize Fellowship, Tunneling spectroscopy of two-dimensional superconductors withh the quantum twisting microscope (co-authors: Felix von Oppen,  Leonid Glazman) [Session MAR-J36: Heavy Fermions, Superconductivity, and Correlated States in Twisted Bilayer  Graphene and Superlattice]

• Xinze Yang, graduate student, Investigating the Momentum Structure of Superconductivity via Quasiparticle Interference in CsV3Sb5 using Scanning Tunneling Microscopy: Part 1 (co-authors: Aaron Greenberg, Junze Deng, Pranab Kumar Nag, Kirsty Scott, Yi Jiang, Chandra Shekhar, Dong Chen, Claudia Felser, Santiago Blanco-Canosa, Andrei Bernevig, Eduardo Da Silva Neto [Session MAR-C31: Superconductivity on the Kagome Lattice]

Focus session talks

• Sam Banks, graduate student, Epidermal Cell Lobe Formation Occurs via Cell Wall Wrinkling (co-authors: Alexander Morand, Adam Roddy, Mark D. Shattuck, Corey O’Hern) [Session MAR-W61: Plant and Fungal Physics I]

• Jeremy Barrios, graduate student, Physical Neural Nets Model for Eukaryotic Receptor Signaling (co-authors: Purushottam Dixit) [Session MAR-F61: Cellular Sensing and Signaling I]

• Jose Betancourt, graduate student, To steer or not to steer? Information-limited navigation selects discrete jumps (co-authors: Matthew Leighton, Ben Machta, Michael Abbott) [Session MAR-F61: Cellular Sensing and Signaling I]

• Yu Fu, graduate student, Signal transduction through nonequilibrium nucleation of prewet surface condensates (co-authors: Mason Rouches, Ben Machta) [Session MAR-M60: Biomolecular Condensates III - Beyond Phase Separation: Thermodynamic Phase Transitions that Structure the Cellular Environment]

• John Garmon, graduate student, Demonstrating a high-fidelity bosonic control architecture with a dynamic dispersive shift (part 1 of 2)

• Shwetlana Jha, YC’2027, Correcting for Y errors with the Bacon-Shor code (co-authors: Kaavya Sahay, Harshvardhan Babla, Steven Flammia, Shruti Puri) [Session MAR-C09: Decoders for quantum error-correcting codes]

• Christopher Lynn, assistant professor, Simple low-dimensional computations explain neuronal activity [Session MAR-P60: Physics of Neural Systems II]

• Benjamin Machta, assistant professor, Extracellular vesicles could transmith useful genetic information from somatic cells to the germline [Session MAR-W60: Evolutionary Dynamics III]

• Cyril Metzger, postdoctoral associate, Thermal nonlinearity and readout-induced TLS heating in phoninic crystal resonators (co-authors: Alec Emser, Brendon Rose, Konrad Lehnert) [Session MAR-S16: Hybrid Quantum Systems I]

• Asheesh Momi, graduate student, Are otoacoustic emissions high-frequency extended modes? (co-authors: Michael Abbott, Isabella Graf, Ben Machta) [Session MAR-l57: Cellular Sensing and Signaling II]

• Eric Regis, graduate student, The Wasserstein Geometry of Real-Space Renormalization [Session MAR-B63: Nonequilibrium Statistical Physics]

• Shivnag Sista, graduate student, Modeling capillary droplet breakup when flowing thhrough microfluidic  obstacle arrays (co-authors: David Meer, Eric Weeks, Mark D Shattuck,  Corey O’Hern) [Session MAR-A66: Flows  in Porous and Granular  Media]

• Nicholas Weaver, graduate student, Quantifying the compressibility of the human brain (co-authors: Joshua Faskowitz, Richard Tebzel, Christopher Lynn) [Session MAR-A57: DBIO Early Career Prize]

• Sierra Wilde, graduate student, Searching for Invisible Decay Modes of Nuclear Excited States with the BeEST [Session APR-J87: Mini-Symposium: Low-Energy Neutrino  Science at the Intersection  of  Nuclear and Particle Physics I]

Poster sessions

• Kathleen (Katie) Chang, graduate student, Fast surgery on homological product codes for constant time fault-tolerant quantum computation (co-authors: Zhiyang He, Tomas Jochym-O’Connor, Ted Yoder, Guanyu Zhu) [MAR-T00-05 Poster Session III: Quantum Information, Concepts, and Computation]