Yale Physics well-represented at 2025 APS Global Physics Summit

The 2025 Joint March and April meetings of the American Physical Society (APS) — referred to as the APS Global Physics Summit— was a scientific research conference that brought together more than 14,000 physicists from around the world to showcase their work, connect with others, and discover groundbreaking physics research. 

Yale Physics was well-represented at the conference, with at least 26 members attending, including 16 graduate students and 1 undergraduate student.  

In addition, Ben Machta, assistant professor of physics, was awarded the 2025 Early Career Award for Biological Physics and presented a talk in the DBIO Early Career Prize Session.  The prize citation reads, “For creative theoretical work elucidating how physics can both constrain and enable a wide range of biological functions, including intracellular signaling, bacterial chemotaxis, protein condensation on membranes, and thermal sensing in the snake pit organ.”

Invited talks:

• Leonid Glazman, Donner Professor of Physics, Andreev Reflection in Scanning Tunneling Spectroscopy of Unconventional Superconductors
• Steven Girvin, Sterling Professor of Physics, A Brief History of Circuit QED and Superconducting Quantum Information Processing
• Konrad Lehnert, Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics, Microwave to Optical Transduction
• David Moore, Associate Professor of Physics, Mechanical Detection of Single Nuclear Decays

Contributed talk presenters: 

• Daniil Antonenko, Postdoctoral Associate (Glazman), Making s-wave superconductors topological with magnetic field
• Nemin Wei, Postdoctoral Associate (Glazman), Dirac-point spectroscopy of flat-band systems with the quantum twisting microscope (Yale Physics co-author: Glazman)
• Aaron Greenberg, Graduate Student (da Silva Neto), Scanning Tunneling Spectroscopy Investigations of Superconductivity and Charge Density Waves in Kagome Metal CsV3Sb5 (Yale Physics co-authors: da Silva Neto, Xinze Yang, Pranab Kumar Nag, Kirsty Scott
• Georgios Ploumis, Graduate Student (Demers), Implementation of H → ττ End-of-Fill triggers in data taking for the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (Yale Physics co-author: Demers)
• Cade Rodgers, Graduate Student (Alhassid), Low-energy enhancement of the magnetic dipole radiation in actinide nuclei (Yale Physics co-authors: Alhassid, DeMartini)
• Xinping Yang, Graduate Student (Glazman), Gauging Rep(D8) symmetry on the lattice
• Xinze Yang, Graduate Student (da Silva Neto), Development of a New Algorithm to Quantify Local Strain in Scanning Tunneling Microscope Images (Yale Physics co-authors: da Silva Neto, Greenberg, Quazi Rumman Rahman)

Additional contributed talks that include Yale Physics authors: 

• Electrical switching of an unconventional odd-parity magnet ,(Antonenko)
•  Evidence of ultra-high kinetic inductance near the tunable superconductor-insulator transition in niobium nitride (Glazman) 
• Kondo ferromagnets beyond the strong coupling limit (Antonenko)
• Quantum fluctuation and SU(4) symmetry breaking in graphene (Wei) 
• Fixed-point constructions of (1+1)d fusion category symmetry enriched topological phases (Xinping Yang) 
• Optomechanical quantum control of long-lived phononic modes in microfabricated high overtone bulk acoustic wave resonators (Yale Physics co-authors: Jack Harris, Shruti Puri, Peter Rakich)
• Pomeranchuk Instability Induced by an Emergent Higher-Order van Hove Singularity on a Distorted Kagome Surface (Nag) 
• Multi-Agent Debate: Analyzing Consensus in Networks of LLM Agents (Lynn)
• The NANOGrav 15yr dataset: Customized Chromatic Noise Models (Yale Physics co-authors: Chiara Mingarelli and Bjorn Larsen) 

Focus session talks:

• DBIO Early Career Prize Session: Ben Machta, Assistant Professor of Physics,  Overcoming thermal fluctuations requires large energetic costs for biological computation
• Christopher Lynn, Assistant Professor of Physics, Minimax entropy: The statistical physics of optimal constraints
• Michael Abbott, Associate Research Scientist (Machta), Emergent discreteness in optimal behavior (Yale Physics co-author Machta) 
• Matthew Leighton, Postdoctoral Associate (Lynn), Kinesin operates as a Maxwell demon to leverage nonequilibrium fluctuations
• Cyril Metzger, Postdoctoral Associate (Lehnert), TLS-induced thermal nonlinearity in phononic crystal defect resonators (Yale Physics co-author Lehnert)
• Jose Betancourt Valencia, Graduate Student (Machta), Energetic demands of information transmission along axons
• David Carcamo, Graduate Student (Lynn), Statistical physics of large-scale neural activity with loops (Yale Physics co-author Lynn)
• Allison Culbert, Graduate Student (Sweeney), Two-Dimensional Living Hyperuniformity in the Visible Regime (Yale Physics co-authors: Halona Dantes, Amanda Holt, Sweeney)
• Yu Fu, Graduate Student (Machta), Prewetting Drives Membrane Curvature (Yale co-authors: Machta, Momi) 
• Yinchen Hao, Graduate Student (Jack Harris), Optical Whispering Gallery Modes In Levitated Superfluid Helium Drops  (Yale Physics co-authors: Igor Brandao, Chitres Guria, Jack Harris, Theophilus Human,  Yogesh Patil, Ingrid Slattery)  
• Pranav Kantroo, Graduate Student (Machta), High fitness paths can connect proteins with low sequence overlap (Yale Physics co-author Machta) 
• Asheesh Momi, Graduate Student (Machta), Collective Modes in the Mammalian Cochlea (Yale Physics co-authors Abbott, Machta) 
• Mahathi Narayanaswamy, Graduate Student (Machta), Electrochemical circuits for detecting nanovolt potentials with ion channels (Yale Physics co-author Machta) 
• Derek Sherry, Graduate Student (Machta), Implementing lattice ultrasensitivity in E. coli chemotaxis (Yale Physics co-author Machta) 
• Nick Weaver, Graduate Student (Lynn), Minimax entropy models for human whole-brain activity (Yale Physics co-author Lynn)

Additional focus session talks that include Yale Physics authors: 

• Discerning short- and long-range charge orders in YBa2Cu3O6+x using ultrafast resonant soft X-ray scattering (da Silva Neto)
• Engineering the phononic density of states in a flip-chip electro-optomechanical system (Lehnert)
• Thin-film quartz for high-coherence piezoelectric phononic crystal resonators (Yale Physics co-authors Lehnert, Metzger)
•  Measurement of a microwave cavity via hybridization with a remote Josephson circuit (Lehnert),
•  TLS-induced thermal nonlinearity in phononic crystal defect resonators (Lehnert)
• Neural subspaces and the limits of mean-field theory (Lynn)
• Inferring minimax entropy models from neural responses to natural movies (Lynn) 
• Simulating a surface code based on dual-rail cavity qubits (Girvin)
•  Quantum Error Correction of Qudits Beyond Break-even (Girvin)
• Towards fault-tolerant stabilization of a GKP qubit using a Kerr-cat qubit (Girvin)
• Error-correctable microwave dual-rail qubits (Girvin)
• Quantum Random Access Memory: High-bandwidth solution and low-overhead QEC protocol (Girvin)
• Fault-tolerant photon addition for the bosonic error correction (Girvin)
• Systematic construction of time-dependent Hamiltonians for microwave-driven Josephson circuits (Girvin)

Additional session talks that include Yale Physics authors:

• A persistent-current-biased and current-actuated tunable coupler for modular quantum network (Lehnert)
• Noise performance of a high-throughput microwave-optical transducer in upconversion and downconversion (Part 1) (Lehnert)
•  Noise performance of a high-throughput microwave-optical transducer in upconversion and downconversion (Part II) (Lehnert)
•  Opto-Electro-Mechanical Transduction of Noisy Coherent States (Lehnert)
• Coherent microwave single-photon source for a mechanically mediated electro-optic transducer (Lehnert)

Poster session

• Halona Dantes, Graduate Student (Sweeney), Inferring Structure Factor of Living, Disordered Hyperuniform Systems with Structural Color
• Vasilisa K Malenkiy, Undergraduate Student (Moore), An Inkjet-Based Microsphere Loading System for Optical Precision Levitation in Sterile Neutrino Searches (Yale Physics co-authors: Jackie Baeza-Rubio, Lucas Darroch, Cecily Lowe, Aaron Markowitz, Siddhant Mehrotra, Moore, Thomas Penny, Benjamin Siegel, Yu-Han Tseng, Jiaxiang Wang)