From 2 to 6 February 2026, the MITP Topical Workshop "Exotic Quarkonia in Heavy-Ion Collisions" will take place in Mainz (Germany). The workshop is organized by some members of the Institute of Cosmos Sciences and the University of Barcelona (M.A. Escobedo, J.M. Torres-Rincon). This topical workshop will bring together leading theorists and experimentalists to explore the world of exotic quarkonia, hadrons made of two heavy quarks whose structure challenges the conventional quark model. Recent observations of these states in heavy-ion collisions open new avenues to study their nature and the properties of the quark-gluon plasma, a state of matter created in these collisions.

From 9 to 11 December 2025 will take place the 6th Workshop on Future Directions in Spectroscopy Analysis (FDSA2025) in our department. The workshop is organized by members of the Institute of Cosmos Sciences and the University of Barcelona (V. Mathieu, G. Montaña, S. Gonzàlez-Solis, N. Hammoud). At this workshop, recent progress on spectroscopy, involving non-ordinary hadrons in particular will be reviewed. The workshop aims at gathering experiment, phenomenology, and lattice QCD together to discuss the key points and future directions involving modern hadron spectroscopy, and will be centered on the JPAC activities within the ExoHad Collaboration.

Glòria Montaña rejoined the Hadronic Physics Group as a postdoctoral researcher in October 2025. She is recipient of the Beatriu de Pinós 2024 grant. She completed her PhD here before heading to Jefferson Lab, where she spent three years as a postdoc. After her time abroad, Glòria is back with the team and continues her work in hadron spectroscopy. And we are very happy to welcome her again!

Toni Rubio Abadal joined our section as an assistant professor (professor lector) in September 2025. He is currently starting an ultracold-atom laboratory in the department. Before joining the section, Toni was a postdoctoral researcher at ICFO (Castelldefels), and a PhD student at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (Munich, Germany). He is originally from Barcelona and did his Bachelor studies in the Physics Faculty at UB.

Nadine Hammoud is our new postdoctoral researcher since June 2024, focusing on amplitude analysis and exotic states. Nadine, originally from Lebanon, is a full member of the JPAC group. She graduated in March 2024 from the Institute of Nuclear Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences (IFJ-PAN) and the Krakow School of Interdisciplinary PhD Studies (KISD) in Krakow, Poland.

This month we welcome two new postdoctoral researchers. Emmanuele Costa just graduated from a PhD of the University of Camerino. He is originally from Sicily.

Alejandro Romero is an alumnus of the Physics Faculty at UB and obtained a PhD from the University of Hamburg.

From 8 to 12 July 2024, we are organising the 10th International Conference on Quarks and Nuclear Physics (QNP2024), by the Institute of Cosmos Sciences and the University of Barcelona. This conference follows the series of meetings previously held in Adelaide, Julich, Bloomington, Madrid, Beijing, Palaiseau, Valparaiso, Tsukuba and Tallahassee. Experimentalists and theorists discuss recent developments in the field of hadron and nuclear physics, continuing previous discussions and presenting new results on the quark and gluon structure of hadrons, hadron spectroscopy and decays, hadron interactions and nuclear structure, and hot and cold dense matter.