V. EVENTSRIKEN Accel. Prog. Rep. 54 (2021)

RIKEN Accel. Prog. Rep. 54 (2021)

The 8th Asia-Pacific Conference on Few-Body Problems in Physics(APFB2020)
E. Hiyama,∗1,∗2 A. Tamii,∗3 and S. Ishikawa4
The 72th Yamada Conference: The 8th AsiaPaciﬁc Conference on Few-Body Problems in Physics(APFB2020) was held in Kanazawa, Japan on March
1–5, 2021. The purpose of the APFB conference is toencourage PhD students and young researchers in Asian
countries to study few-body problems in various physics
ﬁelds. The 1st APFB conference was held in Tokyo in
1999. Subsequently, we held the following APFB conferences: 2nd APFB, Shanghai, China in 2002; 3rd APFB,Nakhon Ratchasima, Thailand in 2005; 4th APFB, Depok, Indonesia in 2008; 5th APFB, Seoul, Korea in 2011;
6th APFB, Adelaide, Australia in 2014; and 7th APFB,Guilin, China in 2017. The 8th APFB was planned tobe conducted in August 2020. However, because of theCOVID-19 pandemic, we postponed it to March 1–5,2021. As the pandemic situation continued well into
2021, we organized the conference in a hybrid format,
that is, with participation both online and on-site. The
venue for the on-site part of the conference was Bunka
hall in Kanazawa, where one large room was prepared forthe plenary session and two smaller rooms were preparedfor parallel sessions. While maintaining social distancing, we prepared desks and chairs for 60 persons in theplenary-session room and for approximately 20 persons
in the other rooms. Moreover, on-site participants wererequested to wear masks during the conference, and theconsumption of food and drinks was prohibited.
The following topics were covered in APFB2020: fewhadron systems and their interactions, hadron structure and quantum chromodynamics, structure of lightnuclei and hypernuclei, relativistic aspects of few-bodysystems near stability and their interactions, symmetries and symmetry breaking, electroweak interactions

Fig. 1. Conference photograph from the on-site venue.
∗1∗2∗3∗4RIKEN Nishina Center
Department of Physics, Tohoku University
RCNP, Osaka University
Science Research Center, Hosei University

Fig. 2. Opening address at the on-site venue.

in few-hadron systems, atomic and molecular systems,
exotic few-body systems and astrophysics, and methods
in few-body systems
This hybrid conference had approximately 300 participants in total, of which 50 participants attended onsite and approximately 250 attended online. We had
160 domestic participants, about 80 participants fromother Asian countries, 40 from Europe, and 15 fromthe U.S.A. All participants from abroad attended online. APFB2020 featured 36 plenary talks, 10 invited
talks in parallel sessions, and 90 contributed talks. The
most diﬃcult tasks in the hybrid-style conference was toorganize a scientiﬁc program and to solve network problems. We also needed to address the diﬀerences in timezone among Asian countries, Europe, and the U.S.A.
Therefore, we split the plenary session into the morning(for the US time zone) and evening (for the Europeantime zone). The parallel sessions were conducted late in
the morning and in the early afternoon. In addition, we
carefully prepared a reliable network connection, which
was expensive. However, we were concerned about poor
network connections from presenters. To avoid this difﬁculty, we asked them to provide recoded talks in advance. As expected, we had to use some of the recodedtalks during the conference because of poor connections.
The next international Conference on few-body problems in physics will be held in Beijing, China in 2022.
We hope that the conference will be conducted entirely
on-site as it would be more eﬃcient to conduct discussions on physics in that manner.
Finally, we would like to acknowledge RIKEN Nishina
Center, RCNP, RIKEN iTHEMS, Kyushu University,and Tohoku University as co-host institutes and universities. Furthermore, the conference was hosted by theYamada Science Foundation through a Grant-in-Aid forScientiﬁc Research on Innovative Areas, titled “Clustering as windows on the hierarchical structure of quantumsystems.”- 196 -1