The 11th Persian Young Naturalists’ Tournament, PYNT 2023 in Physics, Chemistry and Biology for 12-16 year old teenagers was held on 9 and 10 March 2023 by Ariaian Young innovative Minds Institute (AYIMI) and ADIB Cultural and Artistic Institute. In this competition, teams from Tehran, Karaj, Mashhad, and Shahriar schools participated and presented their research projects in both Farsi and English languages from among the problems of this global tournament , IYNT 2023. The winners of national gold, silver and bronze medals are:

Gold medal winners from Allame Helli and Vale schools in Tehran:

Seyed Amirmahdi Esmaeilzadeh, Amir Ali Safari, Arvin Talai and Seyed Mohammad Parsa Raeeszadeh Mousaviyan

SETAREH FAROKH AMIN, NIKI TEIMOORI, ARTIN RADMATIN, BARAN BAHMAN, SARINA NOSRATI, NIKI ABTAHI

Silver medal winners from Andisheh Farda and Sama schools in Mashhad and Valeh in Tehran and Karaj:

Parsa Saadatjoo, Parham Sabzekar, Manouchehr Zulfaqari, Sam Noorani, ADRINA ROKNI PEZESHKIAN, ARMAGHAN ARVANEH JOUNEGHANI, NARIN YARMOHAMMAD TOOSKI, SOPHIA NADERI, RONIA GHAFOORI, BAHAR GOL AFSHAN, Amir Ali Mahmoudi, Mohammad Mahdi Rakhshani, Arian Afkar, Mahdiar Kohkan, Rojan Rostami, Ava Pourmohammad, Raya Nazari, Nika Najafi, Bahar Tajik, Mahour Masjedi, Ali Haqparast, Mahmoud Sabti, Yousef Naimi, Alireza Omidzadeh.

Bronze medal winners from Andisheh Farda and Shahriar schools:

Amir Ali Abdollahi, Kamiyar Alamzadeh, Ilia Naserinia, Mohammad Hamidian and Amitis Saki

The selected teams of PYNT 2023 will be sent to the 11th IYNT International Competition 2023 (August 20-27, 2023) in Almaty, Kazakhstan, Bobek Center, observatory and educational school.

More info:

• http://www.ayimi.org
• http://adib.ayimi.org
• http://www.iynt.org
• facebook.com/ayimiadib

• Amirhossein Karimi,Mohamad Parsa Shahrokhi,Arshan Mansoori,
• Amir Mohammad Eslami,Seyed Arad Hosseini Yar,Iliya Keshavarz
• Nika Sadat Hosseini,Ava Sadat Emamjomeh,Aram Alimohammadi
• Khorshid Jafarzadeh Khosravi,Parmida Mehria,Faeze Sobhani, Negar Sharifi, Sheida Rayat, Niaiesh Vaseg, Behrad Moradi,Soroush Beheshti Zavareh, Amirmohammad pourmohammad Damochali
• Kian Taghizadeh Varzani, Sepand Hashemian,Takin Tehranimoghadam

• Rojan Rostami
• Mohamad Hossein Ezzati,Sepehr Naseri Jole Karan,Raya Nazari
• Bahar Tajik,Pourya Rezaei

All news and photos are on Facebook: facebook.com/ayimiadib

Author: Gieljan de Vries

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An international research team, led by DIPC and Princeton University, discovered that almost all materials in nature exhibit at least one topological state, contradicting the 40-year-old assumption that topological materials are rare and esoteric. In a paper published this week in Science, the team also introduces the new concept of “supertopological” to the theory of band topology.

For the past century, students of chemistry, materials science, and physics have been taught to model solid-state materials by considering their chemical composition, the number and location of their electrons, and lastly, the role of more complicated interactions. However, an international team of scientists from the Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC), Princeton University, the University of Basque Country (UPV/EHU), the Max Planck Institute, l’Ecole Normale Supérieure, the CNRS, and MIT has recently discovered that an additional ingredient must also be equally considered - the notion of topology for every electronic band.

First codified in the 1980s by Michael Berry, Joshua Zak, and S. Pancharatnam, band topology is a physical property of some materials distinguished by unusually robust states, making the electronic properties of their exposed surfaces and edges insensitive to local perturbation. Topological phases of matter in 3D materials were first discovered 15 years ago by researchers including Andrei Bernevig, a member of the research team. Topological materials have been proposed as venues for observing and engineering exotic effects, including the interconversion of electrical current and electron spin, the tabletop simulating exotic theories from high-energy physics, and even, under the right conditions, the storage and manipulation of quantum information. Though a handful of topological materials have been uncovered through chemical intuition, topological electronic states in solid-state materials were generally considered to be rare and esoteric.

However, using high-throughput computational modeling, the team discovered that over half of the known 3D materials in nature are topological. As reported today in Science, the team performed complete high-throughput first-principles calculations searching for topological states throughout the electronic structures of all of the 96,196 recorded crystals in the Inorganic Crystal Structural Database, an established international repository for reporting experimentally studied materials. As stressed by Nicolas Regnault, from Princeton University and the Ecole Normale Supérieure Paris, CNRS, “this was a daunting task that took more than 25 million hours of computing time.”

Through a combined chemical and topological analysis, the team grouped the electronic structures into roughly 38,000 unique materials. The team’s data have been made freely available through a massive overhaul of the publicly accessible Topological Materials Database (https://www.topologicalquantumchemistry.com), representing a culmination of the team’s efforts over the past 6 years developing the modern position-space theory of band topology known as “Topological Quantum Chemistry.”

The team also surprisingly discovered that almost all materials - nearly 90% - host topological electronic states away from their intrinsic numbers of electrons, known as the Fermi level. Even though these states lie dormant in many experimental probes, they are still straightforwardly accessible through techniques including chemical doping, electrostatic gating, hydrostatic pressure, and photoexcitation spectroscopy. 

Supertopological materials

Perhaps more surprising than finding topological properties in almost every material, was the discovery of some extreme cases of topology across the entire energy spectrum. “Looking at our data, we amazingly saw materials with topological properties everywhere!,” exclaimed Maia Garcia-Vergniory from the Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC) and the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids. The team found that 2% of known materials are “supertopological,” in that every electronic band above the tightly-bound core electrons was topological. Among the materials with overlooked supertopology was bismuth, one of the most historically well-studied solid-state materials. “Our results indicate that topology is a fundamental property of matter thus far overlooked,” concluded García-Vergniory.

The ubiquity of topological features observed in numerical simulations lead to a natural question: if the results were to be believed, experimental signatures of topological states should have already been observed in earlier investigations of many materials. Combing through data from earlier photoemission experiments, the team indeed discovered this to be the case. For example, in experimental studies of Bi₂Mg₃ performed 4 years ago, the authors observed unexplained “surface resonances,” which were recognized in the current study to be overlooked topological surface states away from the Fermi level. “The evidence had always been there. We now have a concrete key towards decoding all of the surface features in spectroscopic material experiments,” noted Benjamin Wieder, a postdoctoral researcher at MIT.  “Our database is such a powerful and convenient tool,” added Claudia Felser from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids. “If I am interested in a topological property, the database instantly tells me the best candidates. Then I just grow the samples in my lab, no more guesswork,” explains Felser.

“Revisiting previous experiments with a new perspective is an amazing first step,” says Andrei Bernevig from Princeton University and an Ikerbasque visiting professor at the Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC). “But we can look to an even more exciting future, in which materials with advanced functionality are designed through a marriage of human intuition and artificial intelligence, built on the foundation of the Topological Materials Database and Topological Quantum Chemistry,” concludes Bernevig.

An artistic interpretation of “Topology is everywhere”. Mobius strips are visible from all angles of the cube above,
representing the ubiquity of topological phases in solid-state materials. © C. Pouss.

Publication reference

All topological bands of all nonmagnetic stoichiometric materials

M. G. Vergniory, B. J. Wieder, L. Elcoro, S. S. P. Parkin, C. Felser, B. A. Bernevig, and N. Regnault

Science 376, eabg9094 (2022). DOI: 10.1126/science.abg9094

The construction for the FAIR Control Center (FCC) has begun. The start of work is an important step in the construction of the international accelerator center FAIR (Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research) and marks a decisive moment for one of the largest construction projects for research worldwide. On March 29, 2022, the symbolic laying of the foundation stone for the new building took place on the construction site directly at the western entrance to the GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung in Darmstadt. It was an honour for GSI/FAIR to receive the Federal Minister of Education and Research, Bettina Stark-Watzinger, the Hessian Minister of Higher Education, Research, Science and the Arts, Angela Dorn, the Hessian Minister of Finance, Michael Boddenberg, and Jochen Partsch, Lord Mayor of the Science City of Darmstadt, on this occasion. When completed, the FAIR Control Center will be a crucial hub of the entire infrastructure on the GSI/FAIR campus.

The FAIR accelerator facilities will provide particle beams of unprecedented intensity and precision, enabling scientist to perform unique experiments to gain new insights into the structure of matter and the evolution of the universe from the Big Bang to the present. Therefore, an integrated state-of-the art control center is needed to control and monitor the extremely complex accelerator facility. The control tasks will be performed by a specialized accelerator operation team exploiting sophisticated software tools including AI based processes. The future Main Control Room (MCR) is significantly larger than the existing main control room at the GSI facility, which is suitable to serve the GSI facilities but could no longer meet additional space and technical requirements for FAIR. The FAIR facility is about four times as large as the existing GSI facility and will enable the realization of a significantly higher number of experiments. In addition, with FAIR the parallel operation of experiments increases.

In addition to the main control room, more than 200 new scientific office workplaces will be established in the building, as well as meeting rooms for experiment collaborations and a visitors' gallery. The five-story FAIR Control Center, partial with basement, has a total gross floor area of approximately 6000 square feet.

At the same time as the foundation stone is being laid, FAIR's scientific program is already in its first stage of implementation, the so-called "FAIR Phase 0". Here, the researchers are using the GSI accelerator facilities, which have been significantly improved for their later use as pre-accelerators for FAIR and will be further technically upgraded. Thanks to the detectors and instrumentation already developed by the large international FAIR collaborations and the improved particle accelerators, it is already possible to enter new physics territory.

During the foundation stone ceremony, high representatives from politics, both the federal government and the state, as well as from science and the building industry gave greetings and symbolically laid the foundation stone for the FCC. The Scientific Managing Director of GSI and FAIR, Professor Paolo Giubellino, emphasized the great potential FAIR offers for research worldwide: “FAIR will open up outstanding research for decades involving a world-wide scientific community. With the FAIR facility, researchers from all over the world will be able to investigate key questions about the structure of the universe by producing the fundamental processes in the laboratory, but also to advance applications in medicine, materials research, and IT, for example. FAIR is also an ideal education site for the next generations of scientists and engineers. The current research program FAIR-Phase-0 already offers excellent research programs; in the coming years, FAIR will progressively enter into operation opening unique opportunities for science and technology. "

Statements on the foundation stone ceremony

Bettina Stark-Watzinger, Federal Minister of Education and Research, says: “The establishment of FAIR emphasizes Germany’s outstanding position in basic physical research. The construction of facilities like FAIR is an investment in the future of our country. The Federal Ministry of Education and Research supports FAIR in becoming a magnet for the world’s best scientists. Today’s laying of the foundation stone together with the federal state of Hesse is another important step in this direction.”

Angela Dorn, Hessian Minister of Higher Education, Research, Science and the Arts, says: “FAIR is a worldwide unique facility, which is also of outstanding importance for the Hessian research landscape. The particle accelerator will allow to study the structure of matter and the evolution of the universe from the Big Bang to the present. It is about fundamental knowledge, about whatever holds the world together in its inmost folds, as well as about developing new applications for technology and medicine. The international collaboration of the global research community on this project is an important foundation for its success, but it also holds challenges in light of the current world situation. We welcome the FAIR Council's constructive engagement with them to realize this outstanding scientific facility."

Michael Boddenberg, Hessian Minister of Finance, says: “The laying of the foundation stone for the FAIR Control Center creates the basis for groundbreaking scientific findings. It forms the interface to the international FAIR project and will sustainably strengthen our science and business hub through cutting-edge research. Together with the Federal Government and in cooperation with its international partners, the Hessian State Government has always supported GSI's research operations and the construction of FAIR. I would like to thank all those involved in the project who have contributed to the fact that we can celebrate this important construction progress together today.

Jochen Partsch, Lord Mayor of the Science City of Darmstadt, says: “The pioneering FAIR Control Centre project confirms our location's qualities as an important reference point for top international research and will boost research and science to a new dimension. I am proud to witness that the City of Science Darmstadt is further opening the door to the universe and offering the unique opportunity to conduct cutting-edge research.”

Volker Pohlschmidt, Managing Director of Bauunternehmung Karl Gemünden GmbH & Co. KG, says: “As the executing shell construction company for the construction of the FAIR Control Center FCC, we would like to thank you for the opportunity to participate in this seminal building. We consider ourselves very fortunate that the public sector trusts in our range of services. It represents an important contractor for us, especially in times of crisis.”

About FAIR

The international accelerator center FAIR, which is currently being built at GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung, will be one of the largest and most complex accelerator facilities in the world. The centerpiece is the ring accelerator SIS100 with a circumference of 1100 meters, which has already been completed in its structural shell. Connected to this is a complex system of storage rings and experimental stations. The existing GSI accelerators serve as pre-accelerators. Engineers and scientists work together in international collaborations to drive forward new technological developments in many areas, for example in information technology or superconductivity technology. In the future, about 3000 researchers from all over the world will be able to conduct cutting-edge research at FAIR. In outstanding experiments, they will gain fundamental new insights into the structure of matter and the development of the universe.