Dynamical Control of Quantum Materials

The workshop “Dynamical Control of Quantum Materials”, organized at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems (MPIPKS), brought together the emergent community of researchers working towards utilizing ultrafast light-matter interactions to achieve targeted many-body and topological states and novel functionalities in modern quantum materials. This event was a tremendous success and could not have happened without the dedicated commitment and highly professional organization by Mandy Lochar and the fantastic technical support by Ronny Börner.

More than 70 participants from diverse backgrounds enjoyed exciting and inspiring presentations by
leading researchers and rising stars in the field. Topics covered included novel paradigms for photoinduced phase transitions,
terahertz and lightwave control of electronic and lattice degrees of freedom, Floquet topology in cold atoms and topological
edge modes in photonic crystals, Higgs spectroscopy in driven superconductors, designer metastable states and nonthermal
pathways towards ultrafast control, Floquet states at the boundary of space and time resolution, novel probes of microscopic
dynamics and collective excitations, cavity quantum materials, and new theory directions potentially guiding future experiments.

We witnessed an inspiring colloquium talk by Matteo Mitrano from Harvard University who presented the vision of connecting
quantum information concepts and multipartite entanglement dynamics with scattering probes of condensed matter.

In total 24 invited talks and 13 contributed talks reported both on recent and partially unpublished experimental progress at the
forefront of the field and on new theoretical ideas. On top of that, we had two very interactive poster sessions with around 40 posters,
kicked off by plenary sessions with 2-minute flash talks where young researchers had the opportunity to advertise their work and posters to the audience.

The social event on Wednesday afternoon with the excursion to Moritzburg Castle and a wonderful conference dinner completed an inspiring workshop week.

We are extremely happy with how the workshop played out, and are happy to report that we received overwhelming and exclusively positive feedback by both more experienced and young participants.
Comments include “I cannot remember being at an event where there were simply no boring talks”,
“Fantastic workshop – I am going back to work on my PhD thesis invigorated and inspired with so many new ideas”,
“I finally met all of these great researchers in person that I only knew from reading their papers”,
“I made so many new friends thanks to the relaxed and stimulating atmosphere at this fantastic workshop”.

We can only add to this that the venue at MPIPKS played an important role in making this workshop a big success.

Dante Kennes, James McIver, Michael Sentef
May 26, 2023