DOFFI Conference 2015

Posted on 14/06/201522/07/2016 by YM Webmaster

The Budapest YM Section took part in organizing a Conference to Hungarian PHD students.
The DOFFI Conference gave Physics PhD students from Hungary a chance to present their research and in return, gain an insight about the work being carried out by fellow students. Through a relaxed and friendly environment, it also gave attendees a chance to network with academics and students to create and strengthen professional relationships.
The threeday event (11-14 June 2015) was split into sessions which were chaired by top Hungarian academics in the field. Student presenters of the sessions had the opportunity to receive feedback from an assigned discussant and the audience. The sessions were organized as the following:
A presenter gave a presentation of their own paper (20 minutes).
A discussant gave a short critical analysis of the presenter’s work (5 minutes). A session led by a session leader followed (10 Minutes).
All of the audience was given the opportunity to present their work in a poster. This took place during the whole of the conference.
The PHD students also participated in daily plenary lectures with current research topics (for example gravity waves or the HiggsBoson).
Several physicist employing companies presented themselves to offer different jobs. We organised a forum discussions on issues affecting the physicist community.
We hope that the participant learned a lot, and got to know each other.

Webpage with abstracts, pictures and program:
http://doffi.elte.hu/

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XV Workshop for young researchers in the field of statistical physics and condensed matter theory

Posted on 09/06/201510/01/2016 by YM Webmaster

The 15th Workshop and Award for young researchers in the field of statistical physics and condensed matter theory supported by EPS Young Minds project was held in Lviv at the Institute for Condensed Matter Physics on June 4–5, 2015. Since this year is announced as the International Year of Light and Light-Based Technologies, the event was dedicated to the 115th anniversary of Olexander Smakula (1900–1983), a famous Ukrainian physicist who is known for the invention of anti-reflective lens coatings based on optical interference.

Five invited lectures were given during the Workshop. In particular, the well-known Ukrainian physicist who studies the optical problems, Leonid Yatsenko presented his overview devoted to the application of light properties to the manipulation of small particles. A special talk about personal and scientific life of Olexander Smakula was given by Svitlana Apunevych. Three other speakers also presented enthusiastic lectures on other directions of modern statistical physics.

Young researchers in statistical physics and condensed matter theory had an opportunity to present their own results during the Workshop. Two of them – Khrystyna Haydukivska and Andrij Kuzmak – were awarded for the best presentations by Special Individual Awards. Four other young participants – Vasyl’ Vasyuta, Iryna Bzovska, Maryana Krasnytska and Kyrylo Snizhko – were distinguished by the Competition Committee as the most promising ones. In general, 19 young researchers not only from Lviv, but from Odesa, Dnipropetrovs’k, Kyiv – took part in the event.

Besides the official part, many cultural activities were organized, including city sightseeing excursion, evening beer-party and picnic. As usual, the Workshop gave a great chance to young and their more experienced colleagues to get in touch, to discuss interesting topics and to enrich scientific connections in friendly atmosphere.

Iryna Zahladko, the president of ICMP Young Minds Section in Lviv, gave a special presentation to familiarize the audience with the section’s activities and the general scope of EPS Young Minds project.

The photos related to the event can be found on the group of our section on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=oa.777221795727664&type=1

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Specialized talk

Posted on 26/05/201510/01/2016 by YM Webmaster

This year in May the Konstanz jDPG-YM Section organized a specialized talk where we invited Prof. Frank Schweitzer, who holds the chair for “Systems Design” at the ETH Zürich. The goal was to offer an insight into a research area which is not present at our faculty.

Prof. Frank Schweitzer is leading an interdisciplinary research team in Zürich, which consists of researchers with different backgrounds from e.g. physics, mathematics, computer science, economics and social science. The research of his group is on a scientific description and modeling of networks, their structure and dynamics. He himself studied physics which made him a perfect fit for our event.

The title of his talk was “Adaption, stability and control – an application to complex social networks” and treated different topics on which he is conducting research on. He gave an insight into how to model complex networks and their dynamics, showed to us how the intrinsic dynamics form the network’s shape and what characterizes a stable network. Some of these points were picturized by the example of the network “Friendster”, which used to be one of the biggest online social networks, and whose collapse can be simulated by Prof. Frank Schweitzer’s model.

Our guest was especially interested in the students’ questions and research. During the day, many fruitful discussions with students took place and Prof. Frank Schweitzer showed a great interest in answering all the questions and giving an insight into his research. After the talk, a little group of 8 students went for dinner with him, where even more discussions on topics other than his research took place, e.g. he gave advices and his opinion on career topics and research in general.

The talk was integrated into the weekly physics colloquium. This was an excellent framework for reaching professors, post-docs and Ph.D.-candidates who more or less regularly visit the colloquium but also to motivate bachelor- and master-students to participate on the colloquium and get insight on research topics outside the University of Konstanz. Normally students feel a little bit afraid to participate on the colloquium because they worry not to understand the talk. The students’ feedback was very positive so we hope that they will participate on other specialized talks in the framework of the physics colloquium or other events.

The talk was visited by more people than expected. The feedback also from the professors was very positive, hence we see a demand for a proceeding.

Light Research Seminar Day

Posted on 08/05/201504/01/2016 by YM Webmaster

The Budapest YM Section organized a special seminar to presented current Hungarian light based researches. Recognized scientists from the research industry performed lectures on a variety of topics. The target audience consisted of two parts: pre and postgraduate students who would like to find a new research areas and young scientists who would like to get to know each other’s works. The presented wide scale of topics on light based science and technology have an important part in research, ranging from optics to astronomy or biological physics.

Three presenters from different institutions presented their activities: Fáth Gábor from Morgan Stanley, Rácz Ervin from ELIALPS and Patay Gergely from Mediso Medical Imaging Systems.
We asked a lecturer specially to introduce the largest current scientific research project in Hungary, the ELI Attosecond Light Pulse Source (ELIALPS) of Szeged. The seminar room was at the ELTE Lagymanyos Campus. The lecturers made 30 minutes long presentations on their research subjects and after the participants asked questions from the lecturer and discussed ideas. We planned to organize a whole day long interesting and high quality seminar on light, but it turned out the timing was unfortunately not too good. Because of the end of the semester and the exam period, we had a little less participants then expected. However, those who were present (participants and lecturers alike) had a very positive experience, one our participants has already successfully applied for a job he heard from one of the presenters, he started to work in that job in the private sector.
We learned from this event that in the future we should look for an alternative date for the seminar, and we should focus more on career opportunities than on thematic research area presentations.

Lectures on light & light technologies

Posted on 01/05/201509/01/2016 by YM Webmaster

Lithuania can be proud of advancements in lasers, optics and photonics and the interest is wide-spread in society. However there is a lack of high quality seminars, lectures which are open and known for the society. Thus, the Vilnius YM Section offered a cycle of seminars together with solutions of improving the spreading of information and the availability to general audience.

The lectures took place during the international conference for students of physics and natural sciences Open Readings 2015 which is accessible for everyone and is already well-known to students of Vilnius University. However, we thought that reaching full audience is not enough, while there are thousands of people in the internet who would love to see this kind of lectures as well. In total we managed to have 6 lectures starting from physics of the everyday life the lectures covered a variety of topics: nano-structuring, spectroscopy, light emitting diodes, lasers and optical stimulation of neurons and the essence of astrophysics – the black holes. Usually in this international conference topics are not always connected with optics or light sciences, but as this year is the International Year of Light it was a great opportunity to design everything in order to honor the celebration.

Most of the lectures on light and light technologies can be accessed online on the Open Readings web:
• “Move into Nano-World by Femtosecond Lasers” by Wolfgang Kautek
• “Ultrafast processes explored by spectroscopy” by Mikas Vengris
• “From Nanopowder Science to Next Generation Lasers” by Gregory J. Quarles
• “Optical Stimulation of Neurons” by Paul R. Stoddart
• “Supermassive Black Holes and Their Galaxies” by Kastytis Zubovas

This way the number of potential attendees was assured to be as high as possible. We believe that people who attended or watched the lectures improved their theoretical knowledge and got the best look at applications. Lectures increased the awareness of light technologies in general and the importance of International Year of Light was spread as widely as it could be!

Lectures and workshops on scientific publishing

Posted on 01/05/201509/01/2016 by YM Webmaster

Most of the section members or students of Faculty of Physics, Vilnius University in general are in the earliest stages of their scientific careers, thus, only a few of us are familiar with scientific publishing, taking into account both the concepts (f.e. scientific paper composition and process of peer reviewing) and the technical part (manuscript preparation, reference managemen). During the activity, lectures of invited speakers (“How to publish your manuscript” by Peter E. Andersen and “How to publish your manuscript: Editorial point of view” by Rachel Won) and chapter members (“Introduction to scientific publishing using LaTeX” by Vytautas Butkus) were held.

The lectures of the invited speakers took place during the “Open readings 2015” conference and attracted around 200 participants, including members of the section and faculty staff. The lecture by Vytautas Butkus was attended by ~20 people, excluding the chapter members. There also were several workshops, where the chapter members and the faculty students were introduced to LaTeX/LyX scientific text preparation tools. Some of the attendees were involved into development of lecture notes of the “Mathematical Physics” subject. The lecture notes were printed and distributed and the selected books about scientific publishing were bought. Workshops were continuously attended by 3-to-5 chapter members and ~5 students. The participants were introduced to many different tips and tricks in scientific publishing. In the lecture and workshops, led by the chapter members, participants were introduced to the history and specificity of the scientific publishing (journals, use of language, publishing and peer review process, etc.) as well as to LaTeX/LyX tools for scientific documents preparation.

This event provided a great understanding of the publishing process, essential skills and practical applications. OSA and SPIE Student Chapters of Vilnius University also played a huge role in the funding of this activity. The funding was used to reimburse the travel expenses (flight tickets, airport transfer and local transport cost and the accommodation cost) of our main lecturer – the editor of Nature Photonics, Rachel Won. We have also bought several books on scientific writing: “Trees, maps and theorems” by Jean-luc Doumont, “The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing” by Richard Dawkins and “The Craft of Scientific Writing” by Michael Alley. They are held in our special Students Scientific Association library and are open for every young mind.

Look here the video of Rachel Won talk “How to Publish Your Manuscript”!

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Developments in Optics and Communications

Posted on 10/04/201509/01/2016 by YM Webmaster

The 11th international student and young scientist conference Developments in Optics and Communications 2015 was held during April 8-10 in Riga, the capital of Latvia, and it gathered around 70 brilliant young scientists from 8 different countries – Latvia, Poland, Denmark, Russia, Armenia, Germany, Italy and Georgia – to share their scientific works, insights and experiences in various fields related to optics: vision science, biophotonics, laser physics and spectroscopy, optics in communiacions and optical materials.
The organizers were happy to welcome two international guest speakers: Dr. Pablo Artal from Spain and Prof. Dr. Lise Lyngsnes Randeberg from Norway. Prof. Dr. Pablo Artal explained the novelties of vision science (“The human eye as a robust optical system”) while Prof. Dr. Lise Lyngsnes Randeberg explained the current progress with non-invasive diagnostics of human skin (“How do optical properties affect light transport in tissue, and which parameters do you need to care about in the lab”). Guest speakers from Latvia gave very interesting talks as well: Dr. Aivars Vembris of Institute of Solid State Physics talked about the main principles and advances in organic solid state lasers, Dr. Dainis Jakovels of Institute for Environmental Solutions introduced the audience about “Applications of airborne optical remote sensing techniques for environmental assessment and monitoring”, Dr. Florian Gahbauer of Faculty of Physics and Mathematics gave a talk on “Nitrogen vacancy centers in diamonds for sensing and quantum information”, and Evija Gulbinska of Latvian American Eye Center talked about “Visian ICL: intraocular collamer lens for refractive correction”. During the conference, also a workshop was organized by Jurita Kruma of Digital tribe WWWOLF on self-motivation and time management “So, I woke up today, and what now?”
The scientific work and presentation of every participant was evaluated by our jury. The best speech and poster holder received a monetary reward for their work. This year the best poster award was given to Andris Bērziņš of University of Latvia for his poster “Magnetic field imaging using nitrogen vacancy (NV) centres in a diamond lattice”. The best oral presentation award was given to Tatevik Chalyan on “Performance optimisation of biosensors based on SiON microring resonators”.
As well as attending the many talks and poster sessions, participants had the opportunity to spend time with fellow scientists in an informal atmosphere – during the Welcome Party, orienteering in the Old Town of Riga and during the conference afterparty. This year International Year of Light was a theme throughout the whole conference – the conference logo was also adjusted for this special celebration year.
This conference was organized by SPIE and OSA chapters and Young Minds student section of University of Latvia.

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ACCASTAMPATO writing courses

Posted on 28/03/201520/01/2016 by YM Webmaster

On 26th and 27th March 2015 the Rome YM Section organized the 2nd edition of the writing course.
We invited the same teachers of the previous edition, Manuela Cirilli and Massimiliano Razzano, because we really appreciated their communication skills and teaching approach. Further more, we believe their experience as physicist is very valuable for teaching science communication to physics students because both of them are physicist themselves. Manuela worked for years as a researcher in the ATLAS experiment before moving to CERN Knowledge Transfer Office, where she actually works. Massimiliano is an INFN researcher and a journalist for “la Repubblica”, one of the most important Italian newspapers. Besides their experience as researchers, they are very experienced in teaching communication, for instance Manuela is a teacher of the Science Journalism Master of the Ferrara University.

The course was held in the Informatics Laboratory of the Physics Department of “La Sapienza”, in order to give to all the students the possibility to use a computer connected to the internet. As already happened for the past edition, the course has been integrated in the experimental school on science communication co-organised with the “Assaggi” bookstore and “MadMaths” association.

The school lasted two days, with more than 14 hours, of lesson and practical sessions. Manuela and Massimiliano presented the general rules of writing during the first part of the course. The second part consisted of two practical writing sessions where we had the opportunity to simulate an editorial meeting, proposing and selecting titles for different kinds of magazines and writing some of them. The articles were then corrected and the most common errors analysed and discussed.
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International Students Conference

Posted on 27/03/201509/01/2016 by YM Webmaster

International scientific conference for students of physics & natural sciences “Open Readings 2015” took place in Lithuania, Vilnius on 24-27th of March, 2015. This year we had almost 300 participants from all over the Europe (Belarus, Germany, Latvia, Poland, Spain, etc.) and a program rich of invited lecturers and social events, which gathered more than half of thousand visitors from local research institutions, companies and society in general.

The newly established EPS YM Section of Vilnius University took a big role in this conference. The goal of this conference is to create an ecosystem for learning and spreading the knowledge with a great atmosphere for everyone while improving and delivering young minds to the scientific path of life. The pursuit of this goal was deeply strengthened from the social side. In other words professional development was at high level during oral and poster sessions and is true that sessions create the base for the conference, but social activities including coffee-breaks make the atmosphere, so this grant was directed towards the conference coffee breaks.

All members of EPS YM Section of Vilnius University had their impact in the preparation and were present during the four days of the conference. The growth of the submissions from last year number of 200 to 300 including some submissions from fellow EPS members was quite surprising and of course it would not have been the same without the support from EPS. The expected outcomes were reached as students successfully presented, shared and explored the beauty of the science.

The granted amount was properly used together with the additional support from Center for Physical Sciences and Technology for six coffee breaks during the span of this international conference. The EPS YM Section of Vilnius University is hopeful of continuing the work next year and making the EPS impact visible once again!
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MPL Laboratory Visit

Posted on 14/11/201314/06/2016 by YM Webmaster

The students of the Erlangen Section visited the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light (MPL) Laboratory.
The second Autumn Academy at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light took place from 30 September to 2 October 2013. The aim of this two-and-a-half day event was to introduce Bachelor and Master students to the fast moving field of optical sciences including topics such as quantum information processing, meta-materials, nano-optics, photonic crystal fibres, nonlinear optics, imaging and sensing. The response was excellent. From more than 70 applications, the EPS Young Minds section of Erlangen, Germany selected 26 students and invited them to Erlangen for a packed schedule.

The participants received an overview over the wide range of research fields covered by the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light [MPL] at the poster session that was organised on the first evening.

In the course of the Academy, the participants attended several lectures given both by the Institute’s directors Prof. Gerd Leuchs, Prof. Vahid Sandoghdar and Prof. Philip Russell, by PhD students and group leaders from the MPL and also by the invited lecturers Prof. Florian Marquardt (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg), Prof. Cornelia Denz (University of Münster) and Dr. Jonathan Matthews (University of Bristol). The lectures addressed a wide variety of topics ranging from photonic crystal fibres over nano – and biophotonics to optomechanics to name only a few of them.

Between the lectures several laboratory tours were offered, that allowed the participants to learn about the actual experimental implementations of the research presented in the lectures.