Our first five-day retreat brought together four researchers from Trinity College Dublin, Krissia Zawadzki, and Oisín Culhane, Alessandro Summer, Laetitia Bettmann (from left to right in the picture) and Mattia Moroder from LMU Munich, who organized the event. John Goold joined remotely each day for the talks and discussions (his flight had been cancelled) and to make sure that we were actually working.
During one of the journal-club sessions, John suggested a paper on the Mpemba effect https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.127.060401. At the time, none of us anticipated how strongly this topic would shape our reseach projects over the following years. The direct outcome of the retreat was the article https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.133.140404.
Our second retreat was again a week-long workshop, this time bringing together eleven researchers from several institutions. The scientific programme focused on numerical methods for simulating quantum many-body systems, with particular emphasis on Pauli-string propagation techniques. It included two tutorial lectures, a hands-on coding session using the PauliStrings.jl package, several research talks, and plenty of time for collaborative scientific work and informal discussions.
From left to right: Alessandro Summer (TCD), Mattia Moroder (TCD, organizer), Nathan Keenan (TCD), Philipp Westhoff (LMU Munich), Guilherme Correr (University of Helsinki), John Goold (TCD), Leonard Logaric (TCD), Wynter Alford (University of Rochester), Laetitia Bettmann (TCD), Alexander Nico-Katz (TCD), and Sebastian Paeckel (LMU Munich) who took the photograph.