The 37th Midwest Theory Get Together (MWTGT 2026)

Oct 2, 2026, 9:00 AM → Oct 3, 2026, 1:10 PM US/Central

Building 203 Auditorium (Physics Division, Argonne National Laboratory)

The Midwest Theory Get Together (MWTGT) provides a unique opportunity for Midwest students, postdocs, and professors to present a concise talk on aspects of their research in a relaxed environment. A strong emphasis is placed on short talks that motivate why the research is interesting and explains any finding at a more general level (similar to a presentation at the DNP meeting).

The 36th MWTGT at Argonne Physics Division in 2025.

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The 37th MWTGT in 2026 will be held in the Physics Division Auditorium in Building 203 at Argonne National Laboratory. The meeting will begin at 10:30 am on Friday, October 2,  and end early afternoon on October 3. There will be an informal Get-Together dinner starting at 6:30 pm on the Friday.

It has become a tradition to couple the MWTGT with a similarly themed Physics Division colloquium.  This Colloquium will start at 11:00 am on Friday, October 2, in the Building 203 Auditorium. All MWTGT participants are welcome to attend.

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36th MWTGT (2025)

35th MWTGT (2024)

34rd MWTGT (2023)

33rd MWTGT (2022)

32nd MWTGT (2019)

Previous MWTGTs

Fri, October 2

9:00 AM → 10:30 AM Coffee & Discussion

10:30 AM → 11:00 AM Coffee & Donuts

11:00 AM → 12:00 PM PHY Colloquium: Jaki Noronha-Hostler

11:00 AM Turning Gold Into The Most Perfect Fluid: 25 Years of RHIC

The strongest force in nature binds quarks and gluons into hadrons, confining them under ordinary conditions. Collisions of heavy nuclei at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), now in its 25th year, momentarily liberate these constituents into the quark–gluon plasma—a short-lived droplet of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) matter that flows with nearly perfect fluidity. These discoveries have pushed our understanding of relativistic fluids to its limits, driving theoretical developments with far-reaching consequences. Precision measurements of collective flow and fluctuations at RHIC reveal the transport properties of this fluid and allow us to reconstruct the initial state of the collision, providing insights into many-body QCD at extreme energies. The RHIC Beam Energy Scan has opened rare experimental access to the QCD phase diagram at high baryon density, including possible signatures of a critical point with implications for neutron-star matter. Open questions remain—such as how quarks and gluons reconstitute into hadrons and whether a new state of dense gluonic matter exists—that will be probed by the next-generation Electron–Ion Collider.

Speaker: Jaki Noronha-Hostler (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

12:00 PM → 1:00 PM Industry Career Panel & Lunch

1:10 PM → 3:00 PM Talks

1:10 PM Recent developments in the IMSRG

Speaker: Ragnar Stroberg (University of Notre Dame)

1:20 PM Including valence 3N interactions in the in-medium similarity renormalization group

Speaker: Andre Johnson (University of Notre Dame)

1:30 PM Nested two-body commutators: applications and roadblocks

Speaker: Aryan Vaidya (FRIB/MSU)

1:40 PM Calculation of inverse energy weighted sum rules using IMSRG

Speaker: Andrew Yeomans-Stephenson (University of Notre Dame)

1:50 PM Singular value decomposition of ab initio nonlocal optical potentials across energies

Speaker: Jose Fuentealba Bustamante (Ohio University)

2:00 PM Renormalization group scale dependence of nucleon-nucleus optical potentials

Speaker: Brandon Lem (FRIB/MSU)

2:10 PM Active learning emulators for Bayesian analysis of nucleon-nucleon scattering observables

Speaker: Abhinav Giri (Ohio University)

2:20 PM Exploring the three-nucleon force with neutron-alpha scattering

Speaker: Juan Silva (Washington University in St. Louis)

2:30 PM Intruder states in an ab initio description of neutron-rich Be isotopes

Speaker: Daniel Lay (Argonne National Laboratory)

2:40 PM Ground state isospin mixing for light nuclei with ab initio no core shell model

Speaker: Zhou Zhou (University of Notre Dame)

2:50 PM Finding 4ℏω intruder states in 16O from ab initio no core shell model calculations

Speaker: Shwetha Vittal (University of Notre Dame)

3:00 PM → 3:30 PM Coffee

3:30 PM → 5:30 PM Talks

3:30 PM Ab initio no-core shell model calculation of E1 strength functions for 8He

Speaker: Scott Baker (University of Notre Dame)

3:40 PM Ab Initio Calculations of Light Nuclei with Quantified Uncertainties

Speaker: Pieter Maris (Iowa State University)

3:50 PM Efficient classical simulation of large-scale unitary cluster Jastrow circuits

Speaker: Ryan LaRose (Michigan State University)

4:00 PM Satisfying quantum codes: physics-informed and hardware-aware code design with SAT solvers

Speaker: Benjamin DalFavero (Michigan State University)

4:10 PM Solving partial differential equations using physics-informed neural networks

Speaker: Vicente Chomalí-Castro (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

4:20 PM Improving variational Monte Carlo with decision geometry

Speaker: Javier Rozalén Sarmiento (Universitat de Barcelona)

4:30 PM Resonances with neural quantum states

Speaker: Jane Kim (Argonne National Laboratory)

4:40 PM Hamiltonian gauge theory with neural networks

Speaker: Joshua Lin (Argonne National Laboratory)

4:50 PM LaMET-Agent: an agent framework for large-momentum effective theory analysis

Speaker: Jinchen He (Fermilab)

5:00 PM Gluon Collins-Soper kernel from lattice QCD

Speaker: Artur Avkhadiev (Argonne National Laboratory)

5:10 PM Gluon parton distribution from Coulomb gauge Euclidean correlators

Speaker: William Good (Michigan State University)

5:30 PM → 5:40 PM Announcements & Dinner Coordination

6:30 PM → 8:30 PM Dinner

Sat, October 3

8:30 AM → 9:00 AM Coffee & Discussion

9:00 AM → 10:30 AM Talks

9:00 AM Quantum advantage in ab initio nuclear structure

Speaker: James Vary (Iowa State University)

9:10 AM Bayesian Monte Carlo extraction of generalized parton distributions

Speaker: Eric Moffat (Temple University/Argonne National Laboratory)

9:20 AM Finite-energy sum rules in πη scattering

Speaker: Johan Sebastian Guzman Varela (Indiana University Bloomington)

9:30 AM Bayesian parameter estimation of the LHC system size scan

Speaker: Surkhab Kaur (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

9:40 AM Synchrotron radiation and chiral magnetic effect

Speaker: Nandagopal Vijayakumar (Iowa State University)

9:50 AM Light nuclei production in heavy-ion collisions

Speaker: Oleh Savchuk (Facility for Rare Isotope Beams)

10:00 AM Cluster production in 108Sn + 112Sn collisions at 270 MeV/A

Speaker: Jovanie Nkouakep (FRIB/MSU)

10:10 AM Emulation and Bayesian analysis of critical-point observables in an interacting hadron resonance gas

Speaker: Feyisola Nana (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

10:20 AM Constraints from Bayesian inference to a strange holographic equation of state

Speaker: Leonardo Pena (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

10:30 AM → 11:00 AM Coffee & Group Photo

11:00 AM → 12:10 PM Talks

11:00 AM Three- and four-body chiral forces in dense matter

Speaker: Mia Kumamoto (UC Berkeley, Ohio University)

11:10 AM Maximum mass emulator for the neutron star equation of state

Speaker: Emily Dillingham (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

11:20 AM Quark matter phase boundary evolution in neutron star mergers

Speaker: Jiazhen Shao (Washington University in St. Louis)

11:30 AM Shock wave regularization and effective field theory

Speaker: Douglas Domingues (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

11:40 AM Hydrodynamics in open quantun many-body systems

Speaker: Zhi-Li Zhou (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

11:50 AM Enforcing fluctuation-dissipation relations via an emergent Z2 symmetry

Speaker: Dhruv Kush (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

12:00 PM Spatial distinguishability in quantum matter: a study in the Luttinger liquid

Speaker: Abby Keenan (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

12:10 PM → 12:20 PM Closing Remarks