Physics pizza party season 6

Posted on 16/07/201816/07/2018 by YM Webmaster

One of the main goals of EPS Young Minds project is to connect young scientists from different physics fields. We have therefore decided to organize students’ colloquiums called Physics Pizza Party: students 4 students (PPP), where young scientists from our and other universities presented their research activities in an informal manner. After the success of these colloquiums in the previous semesters, PPP has shown to be a successful concept also in this summer semester of 2018.

Totally, three PPP events were organized this semester, where different physics fields were presented by students from Faculty of Mathematics and Physics and Faculty of Science of the Charles University and by students from the FNSPE CTU in Prague. Students’ research talks presented topics such as determination of protein structure, atomic force microscopy or search for the life in the solar system. The last colloquium was organized in the collaboration with The Union of Czech Mathematicians and Physicists.

Majority of invited speakers have not experienced before presenting their research activities in front of the audience which was unfamiliar with the topic. Despite this fact, each talk was perfectly prepared, and therefore there was no problem to understand the given topic. These events were scheduled for 90 minutes each, with half of the time dedicated to the presentation and another half to the discussion, but due to participants’ interest and their questions, in the end, the colloquiums took even more time – around 2 hours. According to the speakers, it was a very rewarding experience for them.

Advertisement of the events was made in form of posters placed in the buildings of FMP CU and FNSPE CTU. To catch the interest of as many participants as possible, these colloquiums were also promoted through social networks such as Facebook and Instagram. Due to the promotion, which aroused high interest for the PPP events, the average number of participants was around 30 students per one colloquium.

The Prague EPS Young Minds Section found these colloquiums rewarding since the “students for students” style of presentations is still very rare in our country and we were one of the first who organized this kind of meetings. According to the feedback from our participants, we concluded that our colloquiums were successful since they were very positively rated. Thanks to this positive feedback and the high number of attendees, we would like to continue with this activity during the upcoming academic year.

Physics Cafè 2

Posted on 16/07/2018 by YM Webmaster

Similarly, as in the previous semesters, Prague EPS Young Minds, together with JCMF (the Union of Czech Mathematicians and Physicists) and CFS (Czech Society of Physics), organized Physics Café during the spring semester of 2018. The aim of the project was to further enhance the achievements gained in previous volumes of Physics Café – to organize informal meetings related to the physics and related scientific fields where students and senior academics can meet each other and share their experience and interests.

Because of the high ratio of student participants on meetings (for presentations, discussions etc), the meetings in this semester were more informal than the previous ones. In total, two meetings were organized during the semester.
The first one was dedicated to the “blind presentation” session, the specific format of presenting to the audience. Firstly, organizers of Physics Café prepared several slides for each volunteer, who has come forward. Without knowing the slides, content or theme of the presentation, volunteers presented a given topic. This led to funny situations when speakers often talked about something different than their slides were dedicated to, trying to maintain the idea they got when seeing the first slide of the given presentation. Each performance was rated by the audience. In the end, two best volunteers were awarded. This meeting attracted around 30 people.
The second meeting was dedicated to free discussion of Prague EPS Young Minds members with students, senior academics, and other audience. The main topics of the discussion were future plans of the Prague EPS Young Minds (new ideas and proposals, what should be improved, what should not be changed etc). The annual election of the new board of our section – the president, vice-president, secretary and treasurer was also part of the programme for this meeting.

To conclude, there were not organized as many Physics Café as we originally wanted, but the quality of meetings continue to be at the same or even higher level compared to previous semesters. We plan to continue with the Physics Café concept in the future, hopefully with higher activity of senior academics.

International Particle Physics Masterclasses 2018

Posted on 16/07/201816/07/2018 by YM Webmaster

This year’s International Particle Physics Masterclasses were held at the FNSPE CTU in Prague. This annual event, traditionally held during the first four months of the year in many institutions around the world, gives 15- to 19-year-old high school students an opportunity to discover and become familiar with particle physics. Speaking in numbers, approximately 10.000 high school students from 47 countries participate every year, effectively obtaining insight into topics and methods of basic research. The students are not only allowed to spend a whole day outside of school without being considered a truant, but they also receive a chance to choose and carry out an experiment themselves by performing measurements on real data from particle physics experiments at CERN. Almost 200 universities or research centers are involved in this project.

This year, the event took place on March 9, at the faculty’s headquarters with 60 registered and 53 participating high-school students. The Czech part of the project is being organized in cooperation with the International Particle Physics Outreach Group, Prague EPS Young Minds section, and CERN. The students are given a unique opportunity to obtain insight into the day-to-day business of a particle physicist without the necessity of any prior knowledge of the subject.
Also, on February 12th, Masterclasses dedicated to women students exclusively were organized. The principle is the same, aiming to encourage young women to study physics and related fields and also the programme of the event had the same structure as the Masterclasses held in March.

In the morning, the students attended a series of instructive lectures given by scientists working at CERN, whereas in the afternoon, an actual data analysis from two major LHC experiments – LHCb and ATLAS – was carried out. This year, they could either find the Higgs boson at the ATLAS or discover b-physics at the LHCb experiment. The results of the whole group were merged and during a video conference presented to experts at CERN and students from other institutes from all over the world, where International Particle Physics Masterclasses were held on the same day.

At the very end, the organizers thanked the students for participating and the most active ones of them, as well as the speakers who talked to CERN during the conference, were awarded prizes of the organizers’ choosing. During the day, organizers took care of having the lunch delivered as well as the preparation of refreshments, beverages, and coffee for participating students.

Workshop on LaTeX environment for scientific visualization and publishing

Posted on 16/07/201816/07/2018 by YM Webmaster

The very Workshop is still coming (will happen in the end of September), but we already have started the preparation.
The topic of LaTeX and its importance is now being exploited in local media. The President of Minsk Young Minds Section delivered a lecture with tutorial at School For Young Scientists at the Belarus National Academy of Sciences this May.
The lecture covered such topics as basics of TeX syntaxes, the technical aspects of scientific paper preparation, the online services that offers similar to TeX functionality in the cloud and basics of reference management systems such as open-source Zotero.
Lecture slides were uploaded to ResearchGate portal.
We also have major achievement: as the Law of Republic of Belarus is very specific (we are “protected” from foreign money investment even for small non-commercial activities) it was very challenging to get possibility to handle money from the Grant. We have found solution with the help of Belarusian Physical Society. While solving this problem, YM Minsk team was able to make strong connections with young members of Belarusian Physical Society. We are going to implement several projects together and we expect strong collaboration with Belarusian Physical Society during the Workshop.
That’s all news for now, thank you for the attention.

Working in Photonics in Berlin 2018

Posted on 16/07/2018 by YM Webmaster

On June 13th, 2018, the Berlin Optik Young Minds Section hosted our annual career event “Working in Photonics in Berlin”, at Humboldt University of Berlin. We presented talks by research institutes and companies, followed by an informal “Meet-the-Expert” session with time for questions and discussions in smaller groups.

The event “Working in Photonics in Berlin” aims to support the career planning of students and young professionals in the field of photonics/optics by providing a platform for students, companies, universities and research institutes to meet, exchange information and connect.

We had an exciting program with short talks by speakers from companies First Sensor, Corning, Zeiss, Eagleyard, Jenoptik, Springer Nature and Berliner Glas, and from the research institutes HHI, MBI and FBH.

Many of the students that are about to complete or have recently completed their degree in physics (Bachelor/Master/PhD) do not yet have a clear idea about their career path, or information about careers in industry and academia are limited. This event allows prospective and recent graduates to get an insight into different possible working environments. Companies and institutes on the other hand get the opportunity to introduce themselves to the students and talk to potential new employees.

Additionally, this year we were happy to also include our event as part of the “Perspektive der Physik” Lecture series, in which students are invited to reflect about the different fields of study they can choose. This widened our reach also to younger physicists still at the formation stages of their studies. With this effort we hope to strengthen the image of optics/photonics within our larger student community and support their future career choices.

Scientific Poster Competition

Posted on 12/07/201816/07/2018 by YM Webmaster

At the end of the academic second semester, a poster contest was made in our department. The timing of this activity was well thought since the presentation of the bachelor projects and master thesis was just around the corner. This would promote an interest in the ongoing projects of the students. The main objective of this contest is the improvement of the writing and oral capabilities of the students, which will be shown important in future conferences that they might participate. Being this said, the activity was conducted for students participating in bachelor or master courses, being extended to students attending the 1st year doctoral program.

In a first phase was asked for a small abstract of the presented project, and later the poster version. These were printed by our section and, later, delivered to the students. If the number of abstracts shown itself relatively high for our budget a selection of the best abstracts would be performed. We were granted with 10 posters, where only one was from a student doing the bachelor project at the same time. Most of the other posters were from master thesis, bachelor projects or individual work for a course. These covered different areas, since applied physics, theoretical physics and oceanography. Being the later the less abundant, with only one poster. We were still, very praised with the number of interested students.

The jury panel was composed of researchers from different fields of study, since applied physics to theoretical physics, is in accordance with the expected submitted posters. It was decided that the judges should select the criteria for the nomination of the three best posters. The scheme of the presentation was also decided by the judges, were the contestants should present their work in 3 minutes, followed by some questions from the judges. The presentation was realized on the 6th of June. These were placed in the atrium of the physics department, this way every person that would enter the place would see them. This attracted a lot of attention, due to the quality of the poster itself and due to the place where they were posted. The placement was made one day before the presentations so that the number of interested people would increase.
This attracted a really good audience, since students to professors, on the day of the presentation. After the presentation a coffee break was realized for all the people involved in this activity. The three best prizes were from Physical Engineering students. The first prize winner was given to Nuno Caçoilo, a student from the 1st year of the master degree, with its bachelor project, under the title Tuning the magnetic anisotropy in perpendicular magnetic tunnel junctions (pMTJ) by means of ion irradiation.

The second prize was given to Bohdan Kulyk, a student on its 1st year of the doctoral program, under the name CVD Graphene for Electrochemical Biosensing: Synthesis, Characterisation and Device Fabrication. The third, and last prize was given to Liliana Sousa, a student doing its master thesis (from which the poster was about) under the portuguese theme Emissor ótico recongurável para Lidar. Being this poster presentation the first experience for most of the students we are glad with the ideas and constructive commentaries of the jury panel. We expect that next year the numbers of students will be larger since their bachelor project and master thesis is already concluded.

Science4People BU Story!

Posted on 12/07/2018 by YM Webmaster

“From a principle to a dream the story was”
We were a small group consist of students from Bethlehem University, who believed in the message of sunshine4Palestine team. For this reason, we decided to join them as science4people BU team, at this point we decided to take our first step and begin from somewhere.
AL-Masoudi primary school for girls was our first destination. We introduced 7 scientific experiments for kids their ages between 6-8 years old. We were so proud to say that 90 students enjoyed our first event. Our experiments were simple and easy as the ones we taught from the sunshine4Palestine team when they visited us. At the end, despite all the circumstances that faced us when we held this event, we can say that it was the first step for us toward another success.

“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”
In our second event we moved to one of the biggest colleges in Bethlehem, to Terra Santa College. We presented 10 new and not classical science experiments for students from 8th grade, who were almost 100 students. Our experiments were interesting and useful, which give the students new information, and give them a chance to practice what they learned previously. This was another step for us toward our goals and success.

“We were so excited to continue what we began”
Our next destination was the Lutheran Evangelical school, in this event we change our strategy by trained a group of school students to stand with us and present the experiments for their colleagues. WE presented 20 experiments for students who their ages were between 13 – 18 years old. The experiments were suitable for all the students who came, they were simple, but at the same time they need thinking and analyzing. We can say that we are happy that more than 230 students were with us and enjoyed our experiments.

“The ball is in our court”
We always take the advantage of any event that gets anywhere to develop and expand our team, and to help us achieve our goals, we continued our journey in the Bethlehem University Science Fair, in which we got a special place to present our experiments to the biggest attendees, more than 400 students from different schools visited us in a two days event! We presented more than 25 experiments.

Science4People BU story did not end, we will provide you with the next parts soon!

Contest of Experiences

Posted on 12/07/2018 by YM Webmaster

The purpose of this contest was to explore the creativity of the students in our Physics Department, from the Bachelor and Masters degrees. Due to the diversity of study fields in our Department, there was expected different kinds of projects and ideas.
This activity was made in association with the Show da Física, a show well known in our University and region, designed to spread the beauty of physics through entertaining experiments and demonstrations in, usually, high schools and for incoming students, not only for the ones pursuing this field of study. One of our objectives with this activity was the possible integration of an experiment in their show. Therefore, some requisites were made.
The experiences should be designed to be adaptable to be made in a classroom. Also, the understanding of the physical phenomena should be such that a high schooler would understand it.
The contest was designed in three different phases. In a first phase the contestants should deliver a brief report explaining their idea (mainly, which physical phenomena were behind it), the necessary materials for its execution and the budget. Our section contributed with a budget for the construction of the experiments.
In this phase 3 students decided to participate. These were from different years of study and their ideas were from different areas.
The topics of the ideas were diverse. One from electromagnetism, where the student made a Tesla coil and tried to explain its functioning. Other from hydrodynamics, were the Bernoulli principle was put into practice. And the last from robotics, were the student crafted a small drone with movement sensors.
Even though only three people decided to participate in this contest, the Show da Física personal was really excited, since the interest of undergraduate students in their show was absent until the date.
After a time of roughly 2 months, the students had to present an experiment that explained their idea. This presentation was made public in the 2nd of May. The jury panel was composed of our president and the professors responsible for the Show da Física. In order to evaluate the di􏰀erent contestants, the judges classified the idea, explanation and execution of such idea components.
The public appearance was higher than expected, where more than 40 students appeared to support their colleagues. In the end a coffee break was made for the people involved in the activity.
We expect that some people who appeared in the presentation are interested to do their own experiment next year, so the continuation of this activity is of great importance. Also, the Show da Física was very pleased and offered motivation for future activities of the same genre. The experience of the Bernoulli principle is thought to compose one of their future presentations.

Computational Physics Course

Posted on 12/07/2018 by YM Webmaster

Taking into consideration the success of our last theoretical course about General Relativity, lectured by professor Carlos Herdeiro, we opted to embark on other course given by a lecturer from the same research group (Gr@v).
Motivated by our colleagues who wanted to learn Python, we asked professor Valério Ribeiro, a researcher at Gr@v, to give some lectures about how to solve physics problems in that programming language.
The course, which was named Computational Physics, took place from the 8th of March until the 7th of June, once a week, during the afternoon.
In the initial sessions, the professor taught the basics of the Python language, which is incredibly useful in Physics. Each lecture had the duration of 1 hour and a half. After an initial presentation of the methods and the algorithms we were going to use, the sessions were spent solving exercises on personal computers.
The initial attendance exceeded our expectations, registering a surprising number of 33 students, from most of the courses lectured in the Department and even some alumni. These students were allocated in all years of studies, from the 1st year to the 5th year.
Even though the number of students decreased with the number of lectures (as expected), a reasonable number of students stayed, which made the lecturer – student relation more informal.
In the end of the course a certificate (with a template given by EPS) was gave to the students. Each one had the handwritten signatures of the president of our section and the lecturer, Valério Ribeiro, to whom we are thankful for sharing his knowledge with the students.
The feedback of our courses is positive and we intend on continuing on doing them next year.

Volunteers-development weekend

Posted on 12/07/201812/07/2018 by YM Webmaster

From the 30th of March until the 1st of April 2018 the Rino Foundation had its volunteer development weekend. The weekend was very exciting for everyone involved. The members loved it, learned a lot and the people who gave the workshops were also very excited about the group.
Volunteers at Rino primarily give science shows in the whole country. These shows are given by two presenters. Because the volunteers have to work together, it is very important that they know each other in different manners. On the weekend we organised activities for people to strengthen their bond. We did, for example, a karaoke night. To hear other people try to sing definitely puts people into perspective 😉
In order to enhance presentation skills, we invited an expert in public speaking to the weekend. He gave a very inspiring talk and we did a workshop on debating, which led to interesting discussions, but was especially useful for learning how to communicate in a nice way. He is also a high school teacher and taught us about communicating with kids aged around 15.
The last big thing which was very useful, was the ice cream making workshop. After the Freezing Physics shows the high school kids receive ice cream (made with liquid nitrogen). To find out which ice cream to use next year, we experimented with different kinds of ice cream to test and taste which was the best (see the attached photo).
In short, we learned a lot during the weekend, strengthened the bond between section members (and the board) and enhanced our public speaking skills in a workshop.