Dear Sir or Madam,

This letter is addressed to all those who, at some point in their professional lives, have worked at the Institut (formerly Service) de Physique Théorique.

  As most of you know, the Institute celebrated its sixtieth anniversary last year. This event brought many of you together. It was an opportunity to measure your attachment to us.

  At the same time, our Institute, and theoretical physics in general, is facing many new challenges. Many people today doubt science, not only its usefulness, but also its methods and results. The Covid crisis marked a new stage in this attitude of mistrust, and the research carried out at the Institute is no exception. What's more, funding methods have changed radically, and funds are increasingly allocated on a project basis, focused on priorities that are often far removed from the needs of fundamental research.
      Motivated by the success of the sixty-year anniversary, but also keen to meet these new challenges, the Institute's management wanted to give its members, past and present, the opportunity to maintain close links over the long term and to invest in the future of the IPhT. It entrusted four of its members with the task of setting up an association. They were tasked with drafting the articles of association and setting up the provisional board for the start-up phase.

  The founding meeting of the "Compagnons of the IPhT" association took place on June 27, 2024. Its aims include, of course, animating the IPhT community, but also promoting the Institute's influence in society. Our initial objectives are modest, and we're counting on you to help us achieve them. It will be up to those of you - and we hope there will be many of you - who decide to become "Compagnons" to build a project, in its animation and outreach components, and to define the scope of its ambitions.

 In order to give the Association the means to start its activities, the annual membership fee (from which doctoral students are exempt) has been set at €25 (see registration details and bank account details attached to this e-mail).
 For the set-up phase, we've created the compagnons@ipht.fr address, which will enable you to let the provisional office know of your interest in this initiative, your expectations, your availability, and what type of action you could contribute. We also plan to hold a first general meeting of registrants at the IPhT in early 2025.

  Please accept, Madam, Sir, the expression of our hope that you will join us.

  The board of the association:
   Michel Bauer, President ;
   Grégoire Misguich, Vice-President ;
   Anne Capdepon, Treasurer;
   Riccardo Guida, Secretary.

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Compagnons de l'IPhT. Association régie par la loi du 1er juillet 1901 et le décret du 16 août 1901 fondée le 27 juin 2024 et validée par la sous-préfecture d'Étampes, nº W913015409.
Address : Compagnons de l'IPhT, Institut de Physique Théorique, Orme des Merisiers, Bât. 774, Point courrier 136, CEA Saclay, F-91191 Gif-sur-Yvette Cedex
E-mail : compagnons@ipht.fr

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Thibaut Arnoulx de Pirey completed his PhD at Université Paris-Cité, where he focused on the physics of active matter and its connections with the physics of disordered systems. In parallel, he also contributed to developing a covariant formulation of the path integral for stochastic processes with multiplicative noise.

During his first postdoctorate (Technion, 2021-2023), and while continuing his research activities in active matter, Thibaut began working at the interface between statistical physics and theoretical ecology. Using methods derived from the study of disordered systems, the aim here is to propose a classification of the dynamic behaviors of ecosystems where a large number of interacting species coexist.

In his second postdoctorate, at the Indian Institute of Science, Thibaut began to take an interest in modeling the interactions between ecological dynamics and evolution, and the emergence of social and collective behaviors in this context. His work is motivated by recent observations suggesting that large groups of animals self-organize in the vicinity of a critical point.

Thibault will join the IPhT the 9th of December 2024: welcome on board Thibaut!

Carlo Heissenberg graduated with flying colors in 2019 from the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, the Italian twin sister of the Ecole Normale de Paris. His initial research focused on the infrared properties of gravitational theories and higher spin theories from the perspective of asymptotic symmetries, a topic that later found phenomenological applications in the context of gravitational wave studies.

It was during his first postdoctoral period at Nordita-Uppsala (2019-2023) that Carlo started working on gravitational wave physics using ideas borrowed from particle physics, such as scattering amplitudes and eikonal exponentiation in particular. He quickly became a leader in the field, publishing several important papers with world-famous physicists such as Gabriele Veneziano. Carlo's group achieved, for instance, the first complete calculation of the gravitational deflection angle to the third post-Minkowskian order in the Newton coupling constant expansion, while simultaneously resolving the high-energy limit problem that was puzzling the community.

In the meantime, Carlo was granted a Marie-Curie fellowship and moved to his second postdoc at Queen Mary, while continuing to work on gravitational wave physics, focusing on new observables (waveforms, angular momentum loss, effect of spins…) that could be calculated efficiently using scattering amplitudes techniques.

Carlo accepted an offer from the IPhT and joined the lab as a permanent member the 4th of November 2024.