An international workshop on "Intersection of cold-atomic and nuclear physics" has been held at Asia Pacific Center for Theoretical Physics (APCTP), Pohang, Korea in May 12-13, 2014. This workshop was supported by the RIKEN iTHES. The number of participants were limited to about 20 to keep an informal atmosphere and to provide adequate time and opportunity for discussion and mutual interaction. There are participants from Asian countries, including Japan, China, and Korea, to share recent researches on cold atoms, nuclei, and nuclear matter, which are fields with much overlapping physics among them. The workshop was very stimulating, being able to trigger international and interdisciplinary collaboration to aim at the equation of state (EOS) of nuclear matter. http://lambda.phys.tohoku.ac.jp/nstar/symposium/2017.html

On May 18-24, 2014, one of the biggest conferences in nuclear physics, “Quark Matter 2014”, was held in Darmstadt, Germany. Almost 900 people from all over the world including 42 participants from Japan got together. They discuss the latest experimental and theoretical researches on a novel matter of elementary particles called the “Quark-Gluon Plasma” which is supposed to exist in early Universe and also in neutron stars. This field is now an interdisciplinary area through which particle physics, nuclear physics, astrophysics and atomic physics are all connected. Good foods/drinks such as white asparagus, schnitzel and beer helped the participants to continue lively discussions after the talks. Tetsuo Hatsuda will host the next meeting “Quark Matter 2015” as a co-chair on Sep.27-Oct.3, 2015 at Kobe, Japan.

I am Chikako Oota, a secretary of iTHES Group. It has been a year since iTHES started, I have had a valuable experience to meet many researchers and secretaries in various field. I am so glad to work with them. My office is 2F #246 in main research building, where is Hashimoto group, please stop by and see me anytime.