One hundred and eight years ago today, Kurt Gödel was born in Brünn, then the Austria-Hungarian Empire or the Dual Monarchy (now Brno, Czech Republic) . He was a mathematician and is known by the incompleteness theorem but also contributed to Physics by finding a new solution of the Einstein equation, now known as the Gödel solution or Gödel universe. He was a good friend and a colleague of Albert Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

We will be skipping the newsletter for the next week due to the holidays. We will return on May 12th.

On April 23 and 24, Professor Shigeru Shinomoto (Kyoto University) gave two lectures (in Japanese) and one seminar (in English) on neuroscience. The lectures on the first day were entitled "The function of the brain" and "Modelling of the brain and data analysis". He gave a pedagogical overview on the history of brain science and told us that the state-of-the-art neuroscience is becoming a quantitative science thanks to the rapidly improving measurement methods of brain activities. The seminar on the second day was entitled "Reading neuronal spike trains". In this talk, a variety of his recent research topics were discussed, with an emphasis on his innovative methods for analyzing the spike trains from a single neuron. On both days we have enjoyed a very lively interaction between the audience and the speaker.

Hello, I am Xin-You Lü, a member of the Interdisciplinary Condensed Matter Physics Team. I finished my Ph.D. study in Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST) Wuhan, China in March 2011. Then I came to RIKEN as a visiting scientist in July 2011, and became a JSPS postdoctor researcher from April 2012. My main research area is quantum optics and quantum information. I am interested in studying the quantum phenomena in spins, superconducting systems, and hybrid quantum circuits, and exploring their applications in quantum information science. Recently, I mainly focus on the nano-mechanics systems, hybrid electro-mechanical systems and cavity optomechancial systems. Specifically, I study the controllable quantum coherence and optical nonlinearity effects in those systems, and exploring theirs applications in the generation of single-photon source, photon-phonon conversion, and quantum metrology etc. I would like to exchange my ideas with other iTHES members, and hope to extend my present work to a wide area of science.