IWW History
The International Wigner Workshop series was established in 2015 by the Wigner Initiative. The initiative was created to connect researchers who use the Wigner formalism, strengthen collaboration across disciplinary boundaries, and improve the exchange and visibility of Wigner-related research.
From the beginning, the workshop was conceived as an interdisciplinary meeting. Rather than concentrating on a single branch of physics, IWW brings together researchers from the many areas of science and engineering in which Wigner functions are applied or could offer new insight.
The workshop follows a biennial schedule and has developed from a compact one-day meeting into an established international forum with a two-day scientific programme.
Milestones
| 2015 | Waikoloa, Hawaii, USA | The first IWW was held as a one-day workshop, establishing an international meeting place for the interdisciplinary Wigner community. |
| 2017 | Windermere, United Kingdom | Under the theme “Everything Wigner”, the second IWW broadened its scientific scope and began the workshop series’ close cooperation with IWCN. |
| 2019 | Evanston, Illinois, USA | Reflecting the growth of the community, IWW expanded to a two-day programme combining invited tutorials and contributed presentations. |
| 2021 | Virtual Workshop | Held online during the global pandemic, IWW 2021 continued the international exchange across physics, chemistry, engineering, and computational science. |
| 2023 | Barcelona, Spain | IWW 2023 highlighted the growing diversity of phase-space research, ranging from quantum transport and optics to numerical methods and condensed-matter physics. |
| 2025 | Salt Lake City, Utah, USA | The sixth IWW continued the established two-day format and its close connection with IWCN, covering a broad range of Wigner-based methods and applications. |
IWW and IWCN
IWW and the International Workshop on Computational Nanotechnology have distinct but strongly complementary scientific profiles.
IWW focuses specifically on Wigner functions, phase-space representations, and their applications across quantum science and engineering. IWCN addresses a broader range of computational methods for nanostructures, nanomaterials, nanoelectronic devices, and transport processes.
The connection between the workshops is particularly strong in areas such as quantum transport, nanoelectronics, semiconductor modelling, scattering, open quantum systems, and numerical simulation. Since 2017, IWW has regularly been organised in conjunction with IWCN, often immediately preceding the main IWCN programme and sharing the same venue and organisational framework.
This cooperation allows participants to attend either workshop individually or to benefit from both scientific programmes. It encourages interaction between specialists in Wigner and phase-space methods and the wider computational nanotechnology community, supporting the transfer of theoretical approaches, numerical techniques, and application-oriented perspectives.
Explore More
For a general overview of the workshop and its purpose, please visit the About IWW page.
For a detailed overview of the scientific scope of the workshop, please visit the Topics page.