April 16, 2026
Organizers: Zvi Bern, Eric D'Hoker, Enrico Herrmann, and Per Kraus.
This conference celebrates the 5th year of the Mani L. Bhaumik Institute for Theoretical Physics, as well as Dr. Mani L. Bhaumik's 90th birthday. (This conference is more than a year late due to the pandemic.) The workshop will include topics on basic issues in quantum field theory, string theory, black holes and gravitational waves and other topics. Speakers include Nima Arkani-Hamed, Barry Barish, Steven Chu, David Gross, Juan Maldacena, Eva Silverstein, Caludio Pelegrini, Lenny Susskind, and three young UCLA professors to represent current and future work at the Bhaumik Institute.
In 2016 Dr. Mani L. Bhaumik pledged the largest gift ever to the Department of Physics and Astronomy to create a world-class Institute for Theoretical Physics at UCLA. The Institute provides an outstanding research environment for our students and postdocs, and helps UCLA hire top-ranked new faculty. Prior to his distinguished career as a laser physicist, Dr. Bhaumik's love of theoretical physics began as a student in India where he learned about Kaluza-Klein theories from S. N. Bose (of Bose-Einstein fame), initiating his passion for deep questions in theoretical physics, especially as related to quantum field theory.
Please contact Zvi Bern (bern@physics.ucla.edu) for further information.
Visiting Physics & Astronomy
UCLA Maps and Parking
Schedule
Talks on Monday, April 6, 2026 will take place at:
The Mani L. Bhaumik Centennial Collaboratory, Young Hall 4222
UCLA Campus
Monday, April 6, 2026
9:30-10:00 Coffee
10:00-10:30 Jani Penttala, "Nucleons at high energies: Parton distributions and the color-glass condensate"
10:30-11:00 Zeyuan Xuan, "From GW bursts to binary dynamics: Unlocking the astrophysics of eccentric gravitational wave sources"
11:00-11:30 Coffee
11:30-12:00 Eric Kleinherbers, "Harnessing entanglement from analog Hawking radiation"
12:00-12:30 Chau Dao, "Nonabelian topological hydrodynamics"
12:30-2:00 Lunch
2:00-2:30 Diego Delmastro, "Particle Physics in fractional dimension"
2:30-3:00 Anna Wolz, "Black hole scattering in the complex plane"
3:00-3:30 Coffee
3:30-4:15 Ryan Thorngren, "The Standard Model on the lattice"
4:15-5:00 Mikhail Solon, "Scattering in black hole spacetimes"
5:00-6:00 Reception
6:00-9PM Dinner
The Bhaumik Institute congratulates Professor Thomas Dumitrescu on his naming as a 2026 Laureate of the New Horizons in Physics Prize for his discovery and development of the theory of “generalized symmetries” in quantum field theory. 
The International Congress of Basic Science recently awarded Zvi Bern and Mikhail Solon a 2026 Best Paper Frontiers of Science Award for their paper, together with their collaborators, "
Congratulations to Prof. Eric D'Hoker and former graduate student Justin Kaidi on the publication of their book, "Modular Forms and String Theory," by Cambridge University Press.