Fusing Disciplines with the Paradigm of Knotted Chiral Meta Matter: The 2nd Annual WPI-SKCM² Spring Symposium was Held
“I like that you call it ‘fusion research’… and I like the term ‘multidisciplinary research’,” said Distinguished Board Member and Invited Speaker, Mark Dennis from University of Birmingham. “You have to be an expert in your respective field” and then bring these specialists with their deep disciplinary knowledge together to create and innovate in science.
Fostering such multidisciplinary collaboration related to knot topology and chirality is the goal of the Hiroshima University’s WPI-SKCM² and this year’s Spring Symposium. WPI-SKCM² PIs Professors Ivan Smalyukh, Shinichi Tate, Akio Kimura, Hikaru Yabuta, Kenta Shigaki, Katsuya Inoue, Yuka Kotorii, Takeharu Haino, Yuya Koda, Yuta Nozaki, and Shuichi Murakami curated a world-class lineup of speakers across various scientific disciplines.
This second annual Spring Symposium was held over two days, on March 4th and 5th, 2025. Despite the rain and the cold, over 85 participants gathered at the Hiroshima International Convention Center in Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima City to hear talks from 13 invited speakers, who traveled from across the world to join the Symposium.
In order to promote “fusion research,” distinguished speakers, Tsuyoshi Kimura (University of Tokyo), Joel Moore (University of California, Berkeley), Mark Dennis (University of Birmingham), were called upon to share their most recent work in the fields of quantum matter; Harry Laurence Anderson (University of Oxford), Tony Z Jia (Institute of Science Tokyo), Hiromasa Niinomi (Tohoku University), Pawel Pieranski (University of Paris-Sud), Jonathan Selinger (Kent State University), Slobodan Zumer (University of Ljubljana) in soft matter & biological systems; Yoshitaka Hatta (Brookhaven National Laboratory) and Raphael Tieulent (ITER Organization) in particle & nuclear physics; and Yasuhiko Asao (Fukuoka University), Sabetta Matsumoto (Georgia Tech), Sonia Mahmoudi (Tohoku University) and Koya Shimokawa (Ochanomizu University) in math & applied math.
The speakers pointed out cross-disciplinary connections and open questions in their field that could be tackled by viewing problems through the lens of knot topology or chirality, such as Tieulent’s talk highlighting the potential for knot theorists to help improve the control and stabilization of plasma in nuclear fusion reactors.
The talks were very well received with questions coming from across disciplinary bounds, despite many speakers prefacing their talks with the note that they usually present to members within their respective fields – Evidence that the fusion research aims of WPI-SKCM² are exceptionally novel.
“One of the most mysterious resources… is creativity. Because we don’t understand [how to control it, we can] create centers like this and put you in the position with other creative people…Interacting with each other to come up with new ideas,” reinforced Dennis.
We greatly thank our invited speakers and all of the participants for stepping out of their disciplinary comfort zones into the paradigm of knotted chiral meta matter.
