Editors

Roberta Citro is Full Professor of Theoretical Matter Physics at the Department of Physics of the University of Salerno (Italy). In recent years, she has matured professional experience in many-body techniques of low-dimensional systems and in quantum transport in nanostructures. She has recently established a research team/activity on quantum transport and superconductivity in low dimensional systems. Prof. Citro completed her PhD in Physics at the University of Salerno (Italy) in 1998 defending a thesis on high-temperature superconductors. After her graduation, she was, first, a Post Doc Fulbright fellow at the Physics Department of Rutgers University (New Jersey, USA) where she collaborated with the Condensed Matter theory group, completing original works on the puzzling phase diagram of coupled spin chains by means of bosonizations and renormalization group methods. In 2007 she was a Marie Curie fellow under the EU’s Sixth Framework Programme-Mobility Action at the Laboratoire de Physique et Modélisation des Milieux Condensés (LPMMC, CNRS) in Grenoble (FR) where she collaborated with Dr. Anna Minguzzi and Prof. Frank Hekking. Here, she acquired knowledge in the field of atomic and molecular systems, working on the problem of non-equilibrium dynamics of a Bose gas subjected to a time-dependent perturbation. She has an active synergetic activity (Member of the organizing committees of several international conferences in non-equilibrium physics and quantum gases and a national meeting in superconductivity, Coordinator of the Doctorate in Physics and Innovation Technology, referee of the APS, IOP and Nature Group journals, PI of various national/EU research projects).

Peter Hänggi is a theoretical physicist and Professor at Augsburg University - Germany. He is best known for his original works on Brownian motion and the Brownian motor concept, stochastic resonance and dissipative systems (classical and quantum mechanical). Other topics of his research include, driven quantum tunneling, such as the discovery of coherent destruction of tunneling (CDT), phononics, relativistic statistical mechanics and the foundations of classical and quantum thermodynamics.

Betti Hartmann is Associate Professor at the Department of Mathematics at University College London (UCL), UK. She obtained her PhD in Theoretical Physics from Oldenburg University (Germany) in 2001. Following her doctoral studies, she held post-doctoral positions at the University of Durham, UK from 2001-2003 and at the Université de Tours, France from 2006-2007. In 2006, she completed her German habilitation, a post-doctoral qualification for lecturers at German universities, at the University of Oldenburg. From 2003 to 2006 and 2007 to 2015, she held a Lecturer position at Jacobs University Bremen, Germany, and in 2015, she was appointed as an Assistant Professor at the Instituto de Física de São Carlos at the Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil. She was promoted to Associate Professor in 2016 and left Brazil to join UCL as a Lecturer in 2021. In October 2023 she has been promoted to Associate Professor.

Her research interests lie in the field of nonlinear phenomena in theoretical physics and applied mathematics, with a particular focus on solitons and black holes. Her research has applications in high-energy physics, including cosmology, astrophysics, and particle physics, as well as in low-energy phenomena relevant to condensed matter physics and biophysics.

In 2022, she published a book in German titled 'Vordenkerinnen – Physikerinnen und Philosophinnen durch die Jahrhunderte' in collaboration with a philosopher. The book highlights the achievements of female scientists throughout history. In 2023, she edited with Prof. Jutta Kunz the open access volume ‘Gravity, Cosmology, and Astrophysics: A Journey of Exploration and Discovery with Female Pioneers’ (Springer), which collect contributions from female top researchers working worldwide.

Morten Hjorth-Jensen is a theoretical physicist with a strong interest in computational physics and many-body theory in general, and the nuclear many-body problem and nuclear structure problems in particular. His research focuses on various methods for solving either Schrödinger's equation or Dirac's equation for many interacting particles, spanning from algorithmic aspects to the mathematical properties of such methods. The latter also leads to a strong interest in computational physics as well as computational aspects of quantum mechanical methods ranging from traditional many-body methods to quantum technologies and quantum engineering, machine learning and quantum machine learning. He shares his time equally between Michigan State University in the US and the University of Oslo in Norway.

Maciej Lewenstein is ICREA Research Professor and leads the quantum optics theory group at ICFO (the Institute of Photonic Sciences) in Castelldefels – Barcelona, Catalonia. He graduated at Warsaw University in 1978 and joined the Centre for Theoretical Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, where he remained for 15 years, becoming a professor in 1993. He finished his PhD in Essen in 1983 and habilitated in 1986 in Warsaw. He has spent several long term visits at the University of Essen in Germany, at Harvard University with Roy J. Glauber (Nobel 2005), at the Saclay Nuclear Research Centre (CEA) near Paris with Anne L'Huillier (Nobel 2023), and at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics in Boulder, Colorado. He was on faculty of Centre CEA in Saclay during the period 1995-1998, and of Leibniz University in Hannover over the period 1998-2005. In 2005 he moved to Catalonia. His research interests include quantum optics, quantum physics, quantum information, attosecond science, and statistical physics. His other passion is jazz and avant-garde music and is an acclaimed jazz writer and critic.

Satya N. Majumdar is a research director at CNRS (Center for National Scientific Research), working at LPTMS, Universite Paris-Saclay (Orsay). He earned his Ph.D. in 1992 from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay, India. His doctoral research focused on the study of "self-organized criticality in sandpile and related models." After completing his Ph.D., he embarked on a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at AT&T Bell Labs in the United States, followed by two years at Yale University. In 1996, Dr. Majumdar joined the faculty of the Tata Institute, where he continued his academic pursuits. In 2000, he became a researcher of CNRS in France, initially at the Universite Paul-Sabatier in Toulouse and later at the Universite Paris-Saclay (Orsay) from 2004 onwards.

Throughout his career, he has made significant contributions to various areas of equilibrium and non-equilibrium statistical physics. His research interests encompass a wide range of topics, including sandpile models and granular materials, transport in superconductors, phase ordering dynamics in out-of-equilibrium systems, persistence and first-passage properties in stochastic processes, interface growth problems, extreme value statistics, search problems in ecology and computer science, Brownian motion, active particles, random matrix theory, and cold atoms. Dr. Majumdar's exceptional contributions have been recognized with several prestigious national and international awards. Among his notable accolades are the Paul Langevin medal (2005) from the French Physical Society, the Excellence Award presented by the Tata Institute Alumni Association (2009), the European Physical Society (EPS) prize for Statistical and Nonlinear Physics (2019), the CNRS Silver Medal (2019), and the Gay Lussac-Humboldt prize (2019).

Furthermore, he has actively engaged in the academic community. He served as the divisional associate editor of Physical Review Letters from 2011 to 2013. Currently, he holds editorial board memberships for esteemed journals such as J. Phys. A, J. Stat. Mech., and J. Stat. Phys.

Ángel Rubio is the Director of the theory department of the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter and distinguished research scientist at the Simons Foundation’s Flatiron Institute (NY, USA). His research interests are rooted to the modeling and theory of electronic and structural properties of condensed matter as well as to the development of new theoretical tools to investigate the electronic response of materials and molecules and to characterize and predict new non equilibrium states of matter. He is acknowledged as pioneer and leader in the area of computational materials physics and one of the founders of modern theoretical spectroscopy. In the last years he has pioneered the development of the theoretical framework of quantum electrodynamical density functional theory (QEDFT) that enables the ab-initio modeling of strong light-matter interaction phenomena in materials, nanostructures and molecules.

Wolfgang P. Schleich is Professor of Theoretical Physics and Director of the Institute of Quantum Physics at Ulm University, Germany. From 1980 to 1984, he did his diploma thesis and his Ph.D. under the guidance of Marlan O. Scully at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, with an intermediate research visit (1982/83) at the Institute of Modern Optics, Albuquerque, USA. From 1984 to 1986 he worked as a postdoctoral fellow with John Archibald Wheeler at the Center for Theoretical Physics in Austin, Texas, USA, and then as a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, under Herbert Walther. In 1991, he moved to his current position at Ulm University. He is author of several books, including Quantum Optics in Phase Space and Elements of Quantum Information. His areas of research include theoretical quantum optics, physics of cold atoms and analogies to solid state physics, fundamental questions of quantum mechanics, general relativity, number theory, statistical physics and non-linear dynamics. Some of his most important scientific achievements are related to the role of quantum phase space in quantum optics, for which he has received numerous national and international awards, most recently the Herbert Walther Award of the German Physical Society and the Optical Society of America.

Stefan Theisen is a theoretical physicist and Professor at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam-Golm – Germany. He studied physics at the University of Stuttgart and at Oregon State University, where he received his master's degree in 1981. In 1986 he received his PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara. After, he worked at the Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics in Munich, at CERN, at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich. Since 2000 he has been a research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam-Golm (head of the string theory working group). In 2011 he received the J. Hans D. Jensen Prize and has been visiting professor in Heidelberg. His research areas focus on string theory, quantum gravity and modified theories as well as supergravity.

James D. Wells is Professor of physics at the University of Michigan (USA). As theoretical physicist his research explores ideas designed to solve outstanding "origins" problems in fundamental physics: the origin of gauge symmetries, dark matter, flavor violations, CP violation, and mass. Professor Wells is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a recipient of an Outstanding Junior Investigator (OJI) Award from the U.S. Department of Energy, and a Sloan Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Gary P. Zank received his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Natal in South Africa in 1987. Gary is an Eminent Scholar and Distinguished Professor, Director of Center for Space Plasma and Aeronomic Research (CSPAR), and Chair of the Department of Space Science (SPA) at The University of Alabama in Huntsville. Gary has been recognized in his field through the receipt of numerous honors and awards throughout his career. In 2017, he was named the University of Alabama Board of Trustees Trustee Professor, the first and only University of Alabama System faculty member to achieve this position. In part, this was in recognition of Dr Zank being elected in 2016 as a Member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the only person in AL to be a member of this august body. He was recognized internationally in 2015 with the AOGS Axford Medal, the highest honor given by the Asia Oceania Geosciences Society (AOGS). Other awards include his being a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, the American Physical Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2017, he was also elected an AOGS Honorary Member and was chosen by the International Space Science Institute (ISSI) to be the 2017 Johannes Geiss Fellow. One of his publications has been recognized as one of the twelve “classic papers” ever published in the Journal of Plasma Physics. Gary is dedicated to his research, which is clearly represented in his achievements over the years and categorizes him as a cutting-edge leader in the world of space physics.