Best Paper Awards 2025

During the CRC’s Annual Retreat at the Georg-von-Vollmar-Akademie, we celebrated the achievements of our early-career researchers by presenting the Best Paper Awards. This year’s honors recognize outstanding advances in quantum many-body analysis—spanning rigorous dynamics of long-range systems and a landmark result on the energy of dilute Fermi gases.

Best PhD Research Paper — Carla Rubiliani

Awarded for:

(with M. Lemm, J. Zhang) On the microscopic propagation speed of long-range quantum many-body systems, Preprint 2023 (arXiv:2310.14896)

(with M. Lemm, J. Zhang) On the quantum dynamics of long-ranged Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonians, Preprint 2025 (arXiv:2505.01786)

Rubiliani resolved a central open problem in quantum many-body dynamics by establishing definitive particle-propagation bounds for long-ranged Bose-Hubbard–type Hamiltonians. Her results tackle two notoriously difficult features—long-range interactions together with unbounded local terms—in a single, rigorous framework. Methodologically, the papers advance and enrich the adiabatic spacetime localization observables (ASTLO) approach: a multiscale scheme removes undesirable N-dependence in error terms, and a new logarithmic ASTLO achieves optimal long-range conditions. These techniques set a new standard for Lieb–Robinson-type bounds in long-range lattice boson systems and open the door to further applications in quantum information and condensed-matter theory.

Best Postdoc Research Paper — Emanuela L. Giacomelli

Awarded for:

(with C. Hainzl, P. T. Nam, R. Seiringer) The Huang-Yang conjecture for the low-density Fermi gas, Preprint 2025 (arXiv:2505.22340)

Giacomelli and co-authors resolve the 1957 Huang–Yang conjecture by proving the three-term asymptotic expansion of the ground-state energy for a dilute gas of spin-1/2 fermions. Crucially, the result is universal: it holds for a broad class of interaction potentials and depends on them only through the scattering length. This breakthrough settles a long-standing question in the mathematical physics of Fermi gases and provides a robust benchmark for future analytical and numerical studies.

We warmly congratulate Carla Rubiliani and Emanuela L. Giacomelli on these exceptional achievements and look forward to the work that follows.