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Posted By Administration,
Monday 23 November 2015
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Dear all,
The International Year of Light and Light-based Technologies 2015 (IYL 2015) will be brought to an official close with a ceremony to be held over three days from 4-6 February 2016 in the city of Mérida, Mexico. As a parallel event of the programme, we are glad to announce the organization of the IYL 2015 Film Festival to showcase videos/documentaries developed to celebrate the IYL 2015. A call for entries is open to select films for the festival. We would appreciate if you can disseminate this information as wide as possible using your own dissemination channels in your countries.
The art of cinema can show us the true nature of life but it is just an illusion. An illusion, at 24 frames per second, which fools our eyes into sensing motion when light is projected onto a big screen. Over the year, many people worldwide have decided to celebrate light and the IYL 2015’s themes and goals by creating several videos documenting IYL 2015 anniversaries, physics phenomena related to light or just IYL 2015 activities. With this festival we would like to get a glimpse of what have been produced around the world and pay homage to the creators of the videos.
Information about Submission Process
Criteria:
1) Any form: Films of any length. (Shorts and Features)
2) Films that were produced to celebrate the IYL 2015 or that fit the IYL 2015 themes and goals
3) Films that are in English/Spanish or suitably subtitled in English (films originally produced in any languages are welcome).
4) Entries for selection are required to be sent in digital (upload) format.
How to submit a film:
Please fill in the following form (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1INvUSmfTsy9nSuGpQhhLHgCt527puBoaxz_vqLVK2bw/viewform).
Deadline for submission: Tuesday 15 December 2015 at 23:59:59 CET.
Contact:
For any enquiries, please contact jorge.rivero@eps.org.
For more information: http://www.light2015.org/Home/About/Latest-News/November2015/Call-for-entries-for-IYL-2015-Film-Festival.html
Best regards,
Jorge G. Rivero González
EPS IYL2015 Outreach Officer
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International Year of Light 2015
IYL 2015
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Posted By Administration,
Tuesday 17 November 2015
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The conference on “Electromagnetic Interactions with Nucleons and Nuclei (EINN)” has been organized on Santorini and Milos Islands in Greece every other year since 1995. In 2011 its location was successfully moved to Paphos, Cyprus. The conference series covers experimental and theoretical topics in the areas of nuclear and hadronic physics. It also serves as a forum for contacts and discussions of current and future developments in the field. The conference has unofficially been a counterpart of the US Gordon conference on photonuclear physics and held in alternate years with traditionally a strong US participation. No proceedings are produced, in the tradition of Gordon and Euroconferences, in order to encourage the frank exchange of even tentative information.
The 11th EINN conference took place in Paphos, Cyprus 1-‐7 Nov. 2015 and attracted about 100 participants from 19 countries in Europe, North America and Asia. This year marked 20 years of successful organization of the conference series and a celebration took place organized by the first chair Dr. K. de Jager.
Since 2011, the conference program has dedicated sessions for postdoctoral fellows and advanced graduate students, who receive financial support. In 2013, an extra day was added before the conference with pedagogical lectures to facilitate the understanding by younger physicists of the more technical talks during the conference. This year the conference added a two day pre-‐conference event on Frontiers and Careers in Photonuclear Physics – skill development and talks for students, which was very-‐well received by the students. As customary, two topical parallel workshops were organized, one on Spectroscopy and one on the Spin structure of nucleons and nuclei, which this year included selected talks from the abstracts submitted as well as invited talks. More than 40 students and postdoctoral fellows participated in the conference by receiving partial support. A highlight of the conference was the evening plenary poster session, which drew a large attendance with lively discussions. The authors of the three best posters were selected by secret vote of all attendees. The winners, who are young researchers from the Cyprus Institute, MIT and Mainz University, were awarded the Feynman Lecture Series and commemoratory gifts, and presented a talk on the subject of their posters at the plenary section of the conference.
The conference covered a wide range of theoretical and experimental developments in hadron physics including, dipole moments of neutral and charged particles, the proton radius puzzle, new experimental facilities, dark matter searches, nuclear astrophysics, lattice QCD, spectroscopy, spin structure of nucleons, precision electroweak physics and new physics searches. With the study of QCD being a major focus of present activities and future plans in physics research worldwide, the EINN conference will continue to provide an important international forum, particularly for young physicists, for the foreseeable future.
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EPS Nuclear Physics Division
nuclear phyiscs
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Posted By Administration,
Monday 2 November 2015
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The call for nominations for the 2016 Lise Meitner Prize is now open.
See this web page for further information: http://www.eps.org/members/group_content_view.asp?group=85199&id=542190
Deadline for submission of nominations: 31st January 2016.
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2016
call
EPS Nuclear Physics Division
ESP NPD
Lise Meitner Prize
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Posted By Administration,
Friday 23 October 2015
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Nominations are now open for the Edison Volta Prize of the European Physical Society [EPS]. The award – intended to promote excellence in research – will be given in recognition of outstanding research and achievements in physics.
The EPS Edison Volta Prize is given biennially to individuals or groups of up to three people. The award consists of a diploma, a medal, and €10,000 in prize money.
The Prize was established in 2011 by the Fondazione Alessandro Volta, EDISON S.p.A. and the EPS. It has been awarded for the first time in 2012.
The Prize Selection Committee is composed of:
- the EPS President
- an EPS Division or Group Chair
- an EPS Honorary Member
- a Representative of an EPS Associate Member institution
- a Representative of Centro Volta.
Nominations for the EPS Edison Volta Prize 2016 should include:
- personal details about the nominee(s), including biographical statements
- citations highlighting the work of the nominee(s)
- up to three statements of support from individuals who are familiar with such.
The deadline for nominations is extended to 31 January 2016.
For more information, in particular to read the Prize Charter, and for the detailed procedure for nominations, please visit the European Physical Society webpage.
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2016
Edison Volta
prize
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Posted By Administration,
Thursday 15 October 2015
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The summer of the International Year of Light ended brilliantly in France.
After PETAL’s achievement celebrated in mid-September near Bordeaux (see related News), the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), the Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) together with Université Paris-Saclay (which includes Ecole Polytechnique, ENSTA, IOGS and Université Paris-Sud) inaugurated the APOLLON laser facility on the 29 September 2015. This inauguration took place in the presence of the French State Secretary for Higher Education and Research, Mr. Thierry Mandon, the Vice-President of Ile-de-France Regional Council, Mrs. Isabelle This Saint-Jean, together with several CNRS and CEA high-level personalities. The chairpersons of the Quantum Electronics and Optics Division and the Plasma Physics Division of the European Physical Society, Luc Bergé and Sylvie Jacquemot, also attended this important event, marking the starting point of new collaborations between the optical and plasma physics communities.
APOLLON – whose name has been inspired by the Greek God of Sun Apollo - should be the first laser in the world to deliver a power of 5 PW (petawatts, million of billions watts) in 2017. This gigantic instrument will occupy 4,000 m² in the basement of a CEA site located in the heart of the new Paris-Saclay campus. Alone the laser room measures 750 m², to which must be added two radiation-protected bunkers of 250 and 400 m² built inside 5-m-thick concrete walls. The researchers hope to confine an optical energy of 155 joules in only 15 femtoseconds (one millionth of a billionth of sec.). The first experiments should take place in 2017 while the facility will overcome the 5-PW barrier. This step will be followed by a rise in power and the facility will be opened to users in 2018, year along which 10 petawatts are expected to be reached.
APOLLON will allow physicists to explore new “terra incognita” and unknown dynamics in laser-matter interaction when a large amount of optical energy is focused during an extremely brief time interval. Capable of supplying the highest intensity levels in the world - far above the astronomical value of 1020 W/cm2 – this exceptional laser facility will be the key for opening new worlds of physics. Among those, relativistic physics, that is to say the behavior of matter whose particles are driven by laser to nearly the speed of light, is highly promising to produce novel sources of accelerated electrons and ions toward multi-gigaelectronvolt values. From such experiments, innovative solutions could be proposed for medical imaging techniques based on protontherapy. Looking at the cosmic horizon, energetic sources of radiation and laser-accelerated particles will simulate different mechanisms related to violent astrophysical events such as supernovae, pulsars or gamma ray bursts. At the microscopic scale, the shortness of APOLLON pulses will offer the means to observe phenomena evolving over attosecond durations, i. e., over thousandths of one femtosecond, which is the characteristic duration of the rotation of an electron around an atomic core. Last but not least, APOLLON will open up unique opportunities to probe and exploit the quantum properties of the vacuum and create electron-positron pairs from an intense light beam.
A new sun is shining in Ile-de-France. And it will be shining for a long time.
Luc Bergé, EPS-QEOD Chair &
Sylvie Jacquemot, EPS-PPD Chair
Fig: Chairs of the EPS Plasma Physics Division, Sylvie Jacquemot (left) and of the EPS Quantum Electronics and Optics Division, Luc Bergé (right) attending together APOLLON Inauguration (copyright: Ecole Polytechnique).
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Posted By Administration,
Friday 11 September 2015
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Posted By Administration,
Friday 31 July 2015
Updated: Tuesday 28 July 2015
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New discoveries at CERN and the hunt for unknown particles keep researchers busy at one of the world’s most important conferences on particle physics.
Since last Wednesday Vienna is marked by pentaquarks, neutrinos, Higgs bosons and the like. Over 700 international physicists are discussing the newest results in their field at one of the world’s most important conferences on particle physics. The conference is organized by the European Physical Society, the Institute for High Energy Physics and the Stefan-Meyer Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Technical University of Vienna and the University of Vienna and is centered around the eagerly expected results from the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, which have recently taken up operation again. At a press conference held on July 27, 2015, CERN’s director general Rolf Heuer already presented news on pentaquarks, which were discovered only a few days before. The preliminary assessment of the experimental investigations that have just started again at CERN is very positive: “The LHC experiments have already yielded far more data than in 2010 when the LHC first started operation at high energies. We are feeling the fantastic pioneers’ spirit of the physicists who are now examining data of a completely new kind at energies never reached before“, said Heuer to representatives of the international press.
AUSTRIA’S RESEARCH MAKES SIGNIFICANT CONTRIBUTIONS TO PARTICLE PHYSICS
Austria has been a member of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) since 1959 and Austrian research institutions have been making important contributions to nuclear and particle physics for many years. One of the main points for Austria’s participation at CERN is the cooperation on major international experiments. The Institute of High Energy Physics of the Austrian Academy of Sciences is a founding member of the CMS experiment at CERN, which is one of the two major detectors that discovered the Higgs boson in 2012. The Stefan-Meyer Institute for Subatomic Physics of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Atominstitut of the Technical University of Vienna, the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the University of Vienna and five other Austrian research institutions are also working in the field of experimental and theoretical nuclear and particle physics.
“The technological developments for the CERN experiments are made at numerous institutes all over the world. Smaller countries such as Austria also play leading roles. So, over the past years the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Austrian Academy of Sciences has been making contributions for the development and construction of tracking detectors that have been highly acclaimed by the international community“, said Jochen Schieck, the director of the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Austrian Academy of Sciences at the press conference. Tracking detectors are important instruments for the work at CERN. Their task is to record the signals left by particles, which allows to accurately measure the tracks and vertices of particles.
The fundamental research conducted at Austrian research institutions and at CERN is not only important for science. The Austrian economy profits from the know-how on newly developed technologies as well as from the financial backflow to Austrian companies. Moreover, the Austrian institutes for nuclear and particle physics also offer excellent training programs for undergraduate and postgraduate students. The young scientists are thus involved in international research projects from the very beginning.
THE NEWEST LHC RESULTS
One highlight of the press conference was the update given by CERN on the LHC restart. The world’s fastest and most powerful particle accelerator, which has also been dubbed a “world machine”, has been operating at almost twice its previous collision energy since it was restarted. Before the technical stop this energy was about eight teraelectronvolts, now up to 13 teraelectronvolts can be reached. Translated into temperature, this energy corresponds to a billion times the temperature in the center of the sun. The advantage of using such high energies is that the more powerful the collisions between protons are the more exotic particles that are unknown so far can appear.
Even the data from Run 1 of LHC are still full of surprises, as we have recently seen again. For a long time, since the 1960ies, scientists have been speculating about something that has now been finally observed: the "pentaquark", a conglomerate of five quarks, which constitutes a further milestone for particle physics.
"The high energies achieved by the LHC since 2015 allow physicists to step on new territory", said Rolf Heuer at the press conference. "Such energies have never been reached before", added CERN's director general.
The underground ring tunnel of the LHC at CERN near Geneva is 27 kilometers long. Two beams consisting of bunches of 100 billion protons each are accelerated almost to the speed of light in opposite directions and collide head-on in the detector centers every 50 nanoseconds. The number of bunches is being gradually increased and over the next few days the time between collisions should even be reducedto half its present value. The accelerator's ambitious target is to achieve 2000 bunches per beam by the end of the year. This will further increase the chances of finding new particles of which we do not know anything until now.
MOST IMPORTANT PRIZE IN PARTICLE PHYSICS HAS BEEN AWARDED
The particle physics conference, which will continue until Wednesday, is also the venue where one of the most prestigious prizes in today's physics has been awarded for the first time in Vienna: This is the "High Energy and Particle Physics" prize of the European Physical Society. Its significance is underlined by the fact that many of the winners of this prize were later awarded the Nobel prize in physics. The winners of the 2015 EPS prize are the theoretical physicists James D. Bjorken (Stanford), Guido Altarelli (Rome), Yuri L. Dokshitzer (Paris and St. Petersburg), Lev Lipatov (St. Petersburg) and Giorgio Parisi (Rome).
One of the EPS prizes, the "Giuseppe and Vanna Cocconi Prize" for outstanding achievements in the field of astrophysics has this year been awarded to Francis Halzen. Halzen is the spokesman of one of the astrophysical experiments that receive the most attention at present: this is the IceCube project, which uses a gigantic telescope in Antarctica to look for cosmic neutrinos. Halzen has been awarded the "Giuseppe and Vanna Cocconi Prize" in recognition of his vision and his leading role in the discovery of high-energy extraterrestrial neutrinos. He explained at the press conference: "The detection of very high- energy extraterrestrial neutrinos opens a new observational window on the Universe. Early results show that neutrinos reach us from sources throughout the Universe and suggest an overlap with those observed in highest energy gamma rays." Halzen's research results open up a new window in astro- particle physics and our understanding of the universe.
THE PARTICLE PHYSICS OF THE FUTURE
Also over the next two days the universe will be the center of interest of researchers working on many other topics of present-day physics. Apart from the search for dark matter and the origin of the universe in the big bang, the higher collision energies achieved at LHC and the by now breath-taking precision of results from cosmological research yield more and more accurate information about the building blocks and the structure of the universe.
The fascinating secrets at the very root of our existence were also the topic of the joint strategic meeting of the European Physical Society and the European Committee on Future Accelerators, which took place during the conference. Researchers hold their breath while confronted with the question if there is a connection between the physics of the very small and the very big, between particle physics and cosmology, the science about the origin, the development and the basic structure of the universe. We may well expect that in future particle physics and cosmology will have even closer connections, and this will yield results for many further summit meetings on particle physics.
The world's largest conference on particle physics will be concluded on July 29 by the presentation of CERN's future director general Fabiola Gianotti. She will give an outlook on the future of particle physics and the next generation of accelerators.
 Latest news, press releases and newsletter about the conference can be found on the EPS HEP 2015 website.
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EPSHEP2015
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Posted By Administration,
Thursday 30 July 2015
Updated: Monday 3 August 2015
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The European Physical Society (EPS) publishes its Position Paper “European Energy Policy and Global Reduction of CO2 emissions: Towards an effective sustainable electricity production in Europe”.
One of the greatest global challenges of our times is climate change. Addressing it requires policies fostering the transition to low-carbon societies and economies which, at the same time, will ensure the availability of sustainable, secure and affordable energy.
The Position Paper prepared by the Energy Group of EPS focuses on electricity production by non-fossil sources. It discusses the leading role of Europe in the broader context of the world energy problem and provides various policy recommendations.
In the context of the Energy Union Strategy and in the run-up to COP21, the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to be held in Paris in December 2015, the European Physical Society hopes that this document will contribute to stimulating discussions in order to arrive at a farsighted and effective EU and world energy policy.
Click here to download the EPS Position Paper.
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EPS Energy Group
European Environment policy
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Posted By Administration,
Thursday 30 July 2015
Updated: Friday 31 July 2015
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The Optical Society of Korea (OSK) held its annual meeting on July 13 to 15, 2015 in Gyeongju, the ancient capital of Korea located in the south of the country. This conference brought together physicists working in optics and laser-matter interaction. While most of participants came from Asia, some of them traveled from US and European countries to celebrate both the 25th Anniversary of OSK and the International Year of Light. Presidents and official representatives of many learning societies (The Optical Society - OSA, IEEE, SPIE, EPS, the Japanese Society of Applied Physics) willingly answered the invitation of the OSK managers to address this meeting and debate the future of light in the world and more particularly in Korea.
Korea is clearly becoming a leader in both the fundamental and applied aspects of optics and photonics. Its world leadership, as emphasized by OSA President-Elect Alan Willner, is already visible in the scientific review Optics Express, where Korean contributions amazingly increase and even dominate US and European submissions in number. Korea is also very active around the new technologies for petawatt-class (PW) lasers and their applications to plasma-based accelerators. In this field Korean researchers already hold some records in laser-driven proton and electron acceleration and they are fully in the race for the next generation of 10 PW lasers.
Many other scientific issues were treated, among which nonlinear optical microscopy for biology and medical imaging, photonic integrated circuits, realistic 3D imaging, plasmonics and nanophotonics, holographic data storage, optics in wireless communication networks, pumped diode and disk lasers, attosecond science, and stimulated Raman scattering microscopy.
A round table was moreover organized about the future of light. Dalma Novak, President of the IEEE Photonics Society, emphasized the importance of rapid wireless technologies and the need to increase the links between optics and electronics in information transmission devices. We insisted on the importance of realistic 3D calculations and the ever-increasing use of high-performance scientific computing. Another point of discussion was large-scale PW laser projects (e.g., ELI), which enrich joint efforts on extreme nonlinear optics and plasma physics, and should further improve medical imaging techniques and cancer treatments.
About 450 researchers attended this exciting meeting. Invited attendees enjoyed the great hospitality of the organization committee. As Chair of the Quantum Electronics and Optics Division of EPS, I would like to thank again Professor Yun Chung, President of the Optical Society of Korea, for his kind invitation.
The Land of Morning Calm appears as the right place to be for future meetings in optics between Asia and Europe.
Luc Bergé,
chair of the EPS Quantum Electronics and Optics Division
Attached Thumbnails:
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Posted By Administration,
Thursday 30 July 2015
Updated: Friday 31 July 2015
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MULHOUSE, [30 June 2015] – The European Physical Society is delighted to announce the 2015 winners of its young researcher Prizes in Quantum Electronics and Optics. These prizes are awarded once every two years, and recognize the highest level of excellence amongst emerging researchers. The young researcher prizes include the prestigious Fresnel prize for research achievements obtained before the age of 35, as well as prizes for the best nominated European PhD theses in optics over the last two years. The awards were presented in a Ceremony on Tuesday June 23th at the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO) Europe and the European Quantum Electronics Conference (EQEC), held during the World of Photonics Congress in Munich, Germany.
2015 Fresnel Prizes
The 2015 Fresnel Prize for fundamental aspects has been awarded to Tim Hugo Taminiau, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands, for his fundamental contributions to nano-optics and quantum information science through the control of solid-state quantum emitters and spins.
Tim Hugo Taminiau is a tenure-track group leader at QuTech at the Delft University of Technology, where he studies quantum physics, quantum information and sensing based on electronic and nuclear solid-state defect spins. He graduated from the University of Twente in 2005 and obtained a PhD at the Institut de Ciències Fotòniques (ICFO) in Barcelona. In his thesis, he studied metallic nano-particles acting as antennas for optical quantum emitters. Before returning to the Netherlands as a Marie Curie Fellow in 2011, Tim Hugo Taminiau investigated optically active defects at the California Institute of Technology and Brown University in US.
The 2015 Fresnel Prize for applied aspects has been awarded to Daniele Brida, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany, for the development of broadly tunable few-optical-cycle laser sources and their application in the investigation of primary photo-induced processes in condensed matter systems.
Daniele Brida obtained the PhD in physics in 2010 at Politecnico di Milano, where he was appointed assistant professor at the Physics department. Later he joined the university of Konstanz first as visiting scientist ,then as leader of a research group funded by the Emmy Noether program of the DFG since 2012. His main scientific interests are the generation of broadband optical pulses ranging from UV to the THz spectral region, their temporal compression down to few optical cycles with adaptive techniques and the passive stabilization of the carrier envelope phase. He also uses ultrashort pulses to condensed-matter spectroscopy with an extreme temporal resolution.
2015 PhD Thesis Prizes
The 2015 Thesis Prizes for fundamental aspects have been awarded to Tim Langen, JILA, University of Colorado and NIST, Boulder, CO, USA, for his thesis on non-equilibrium dynamics of one-dimensional Bose gases, and to Søren Raza, Centre for Nano Optics at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU), Odense, Denmark, for his thesis on probing plasmonic nanostructures with electron energy-loss spectroscopy (EELS).
Tim Langen is currently a Feodor Lynen postdoctoral fellow at JILA, Boulder. His research interests include atomic and molecular physics, quantum optics and quantum many-body systems. He graduated as a PhD from TU Vienna in 2013. During his PhD he has also been a visiting researcher at École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Søren Raza received the PhD degree in physics from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) in 2014.. He specialized in the general field of nanophotonics, in particular nanoplasmonics. He studied the interaction of light with metallic nanostructures and amended his theoretical work with experimental results during his PhD. He is now employed as a postdoc in the Centre for Nano Optics at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU).
The 2015 Thesis Prizes for applied aspects are awarded to Tobias Herr, Swiss Center for Electronics and Microtechnology (CSEM), Neuchâtel, Switzerland, for his thesis on solitons and dynamics of frequency comb formation in optical microresonators, and to Pete Shadbolt, Quantum Optics & Laser Science Group, Faculty of Natural Sciences, Imperial College, London, United Kingdom, for his thesis on complexity and control in quantum photonics.
Tobias Herr is a researcher at the Swiss Center for Electronics and Microtechnology (CSEM), Neuchâtel, Switzerland. His research interests are time and frequency metrology, non-linear optics, laser spectroscopy and applications in astronomy. He obtained his PhD at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) in 2013 and his Diploma/Master in Physics in 2008 from the University of Heidelberg, Germany. Pete Shadbolt is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Controlled Quantum Dynamics, Imperial College, London, UK. He completed his PhD in January 2014 at the University of Bristol, where he worked on experimental optical quantum computing using waveguides. Peter’s current research focuses on large-scale architectures for linear-optical quantum computing, and potential applications including quantum chemistry and machine learning.
Contacts:
Prof. Thorsten Ackemann
Chairman of Junior Awards Committee 2015
thorsten.ackemann@strath.ac.uk
Dr. Luc Bergé
Chair of the Quantum Electronics and Optics Division of the European Physical Society
luc.berge@cea.fr
More information on the EPS QEOD Prizes can be found on the division's website.
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Young Reserchers Prize
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