Erwin Schrödinger’s “What is Life?” is perhaps one of the most influential works in theoretical biology, but what if I told you that one of the key ideas discussed in it was nothing new?

The cutoff phenomenon is an abrupt transition from out of equilibrium to equilibrium undergone by certain Markov processes in the limit where the size of the state space tends to infinity: instead of ...

We align the aligners

Schedule and VenueDecember 8-12, 2025 Panasonic Auditorium, Yukawa Hall, YITP, Kyoto University, JapanScopeRecent advances in physics have increasingly highlighted the need to understand energy conver...

Living systems are defined by their active acquisition and use of information. This Roadmap surveys current research on life's information processes and their importance for the search for life beyond...

Maximizing the amount of work harvested from an environment is important for a wide variety of biological and technological processes, from energy-harvesting processes such as photosynthesis to energy storage systems such as fuels and batteries. Here, we consider the maximization of free energy—and by extension, the maximum extractable work—that can be gained by a classical or quantum system that undergoes driving by its environment. We consider how the free energy gain depends on the initial state of the system while also accounting for the cost of preparing the system. We provide simple necessary and sufficient conditions for increasing the gain of free energy by varying the initial state. We also derive simple formulae that relate the free energy gained using the optimal initial state rather than another suboptimal initial state. Finally, we demonstrate that the problem of finding the optimal initial state may have two distinct regimes, one easy and...

The school will give an introduction to basic concepts, models and techniques in the study of classical and quantum nonequilibrium statistical mechanics. Subjects range from thermalization issues to response and fluctuations in steady driven or active behavior. Intended audience are PhD students and postdocs with basic knowledge (Master level and beyond) of theoretical and mathematical physics. One day will be reserved for talks of the participants, plus feedback and discussion.

SFI seeksa full-time postdoctoral fellow to collaborate with Dr. Melanie Mitchell and other project participants in developing AI models of visual and multimodal reasoning.

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