Annex

NORNDIP, the Annual Conference of the Nordic Network for Diversity in Physics, took place at the University of Bergen, Norway, in May 2024. See:  https://indico.cern.ch/event/1384666/overview

These conferences typically have a balanced mixture of invited physics talks and gender talks. Gender talks cover gender-balance reports from Nordic Countries. Each conference has a special leading theme, in 2024 the theme was "Microaggression", the leading  theme of the 2025 conference will be "Diverse trajectories - Challenging the norms in physics research and culture”.

Below, a short report from the leading themes of gender-talks. Adrienne Taxler reported on quantitative studies of barriers to diversity in physics in academia, quoting sexual harassment, hostile climate, microaggressions as often quoted problems. Randi Gressgård reported on her studies of microaggressions in academic institutions, noting that people of color and women are often subtly marked as intruders even by  persons with good intentions.

According to studies, women and minority people are assumed to be inferior or more junior in rank than they actually are, through little encounters signalling lack of competence, skill or intelligence. Every female professor I know was asked at least once "Are you a student here?" during her professorship career, and not because of her young looks. It is because only ‘When you look like what they expect a professor to be, you are treated like a professor’. Siri Øyslebø Sørensen  and Eva Amundsdotter reported on the project GenderAct, an institutional project running at the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences of the University of Bergen, Norway.

The gender (in) balance at  the Faculty is stable for the last 20 years. The project had as a first part a task to understand the complicated causes of gender imbalance in this specific environment,  then mobilize for change and transform patterns as the last step. During this process it was learned that resistance towards the topic of gender as such is  common in academic institutions. This resistance takes forms of gender hostility - discomfort associated with becoming aware/ conscious and gender blindness - strong belief in meritocracy as neutral. There is a resistance to change and transform gendered patterns that takes forms of undermining, distracting attention, pretending,  sabotage,  avoidance,  disclaiming. The practical forms of resistance observed for this particular project  in interaction with leaders of the departments were:  no open reactions, just ‘whispering in the hallways’, action plan is approved, but not followed up on, open critique in plenary meeting.

The next phase of the GenderAct project will study the resistance to change, and how to deal with it. The most optimistic report was by Maria Saline, a coordinator of Gender Initiative for Excellence, GENIE at Chalmers University in Gothenburg, Sweden. The project seems to be on a good way to reverse barriers to female faculty hiring and retention by investing in excellent hires.

The European Physical Society (EPS) is happy to announce that the second edition of the EPS Forum will take place in the Henry Ford Building of the Freie Universität Berlin (FUB), Germany, from 25th-27th March 2024.
 
The EPS Forum builds on the success of the first edition held in Paris in 2022. The EPS joined forces with its 42 National Physical Societies, 18 Divisions and Groups and 40 Associate Members (https://epsforum.org/v1). After more than a year of preparation by 75 representatives of EPS members all over Europe and the EPS staff, the first EPS Forum welcomed 487 participants including 184 students from 30 different countries.

The second edition is expected to gather about 500 participants with a majority of PhD students, Postdocs and early-career researchers. It will include presentations and round-table discussions on the following topics:
·      Atomic, molecular and optical physics for quantum technologies
·      Applications of nuclear and particle physics to society
·      Condensed matter and its applications to industry
·      Physical models for energy management, pollution and climate; neuromorphic computing
·      Photonics.

The EPS Forum represents a unique opportunity to interact with both upcoming physicists and outstanding established researchers including Nobel Prize and Wolf Prize winners. It will offer a series of scientific talks bringing together researchers from all over Europe, CEOs and managers from academic institutions, large research infrastructures, multi-national companies, SMEs and start-ups involved in the above fields of research.

The first day, called “Physics meets industry”, will bring doctoral students and post-doctoral fellows closer to physics-based companies. It will promote research and technological developments carried out in the industrial sector and favour direct exchanges between attendees.

The second day will host a general conference on physics in the same fields, addressed from a more fundamental perspective and featuring high-profile scientists from Europe and beyond. Round-table discussions will also be dedicated to societal issues.

The third day will be devoted to the EPS Council, the Society's annual meeting.
 

Save the dates! The EPS Form will take place on 25th-26th March 2024 in BERLIN.

Students
The EPS will once again support the attendance of students by offering a reduced registration fee and support the travel and lodging expenses of 100 students.

A poster session will be organised to give young physicists the opportunity to present their scientific results.

Organisations and exhibitors
The EPS is convinced that the objectives of the Forum (details at https://epsforum.org), match a number of organisations' and exhibitors' priorities. To promote physics-based companies or institutions at the EPS Forum and to increase their visibility, the EPS offers the following options:
‐ Attend the Forum as an exhibitor on 25th March and/or on 26th March 2024.
‐ Advertise an organisation by choosing a promotional package.

Sponsors
The EPS offers sponsorship opportunities to support the attendance and activities of early career researchers at the EPS Forum and to support the attendance of scientists from Ukraine. These can be tailored to each sponsor. Contact us for more details at secretariat@eps.org.
 
The EPS is actively preparing the second EPS Forum and looks forward to welcoming you in Berlin in 2024!

Download the poster of the EPS Forum 2024

The 71^st annual meeting of the Austrian Physical Society (ÖPG [1]), held at the Montanuniversität Leoben (MUL) in Leoben / Austria from September 26^th to September 30^th, 2022, will go down in the annals of the Austrian Physical Society (ÖPG) as a very successful conference. The activities of the ÖPG Young Minds, with sponsorship of the EPS Young Minds, were a particular highlight to attract younger participants. Over 200 participants attended on site a very successful program [2], the main organization having been carried out by the Institute of Physics at the MUL and the Erich Schmid Institute (ESI) of the Austrian Academy of Science (ÖAW), the local organizing committee being headed by Prof. Christian Teichert, presently also vice-president of ÖPG. The program was composed of topical sessions of all ÖPG divisions, as well as the annual award ceremony for ÖPG prizes, which this year also included the celebration of two new ÖPG honorary members, Prof. Walter Kutschera and Prof. Anton Zeilinger [3].

The plenary speakers covered a wide range of topics, including the EPS Young Minds program, joint aspects of mathematics, physics and acoustics, symmetry breaking, magnetic adatom chains, quantum field theory, and bioinspired materials. Aspects dealing with physics and education were also successfully presented, in particular how to perform enjoyable and meaningful physics lessons.  The conference was also devoted to sustainability, in particular in connection with integration of renewable energy, e.g., in the steel production, with waste as energy, and with exergy, and the repercussion on the climate and with quality of life. 

A public evening lecture about climate, freedom and science, the movie "The Class of ‘38" with an introduction by Prof. Anton Zeilinger [3], and a lecture by Prof. Walter Kutschera on Otto Robert Frisch and its co-discovery of nuclear fission rounded up the week. Both Prof. Anton Zeilinger and Prof. Walter Kutschera were awarded with honorary ÖPG membership during the award ceremony.

Stimulated by the talks given in the plenary session and in the topical sessions, and by the personal exchange during the poster sessions, it was indeed again possible to show what the advantages of a personal exchange are.  When new contacts are made, when informal conversations spontaneously arise building up mutual trust, then the glue is formed to do further improved research, allowing trying out new ideas in physics, which are the base for the proposition and realization of new projects. It is this inspiring vibe that motivates young members to stay long-term members of the society and thus allows to actively shape the future activities of the society, being then also constructively reflected by the associated activities of the EPS.

Winners of the prizes of the Austrian Physical Society [1], awarded during the 71st annual meeting of the Austrian Physical Society in Leoben/Austria from 26th to 30th September 2022 [2], together with new honorary members Walter Kutschera and Anton Zeilinger (Nobel prize winner 2022 [3]), the president and vice-president of the Austrian Physical Society, and the chairman of the division physics and school.

[1] Austrian Physical Society http://www.oepg.at/ 

[2] Program of the Annual Meeting 2022 of ÖPG https://oepg2022.unileoben.ac.at/program  

[3] The Nobel Prize in Physics 2022, Anton Zeilinger Facts   https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2022/zeilinger/facts/, Physikertagung in Leoben mit Nobelpreisträger Anton Zeilinger (in German)

Author: Christian Beck

This year’s prize of the EPS Statistical and Nonlinear Physics Division honours two outstanding scientists, who are pioneers in their respective fields. The 2021 EPS Statistical and Nonlinear Physics Prize was awarded during the 3^rd  EPS conference “Statistical Physics of Complex Systems” at SISSA/ICTP Trieste, 8-10 September 2021.

Albert-László Barabási  (Northeastern University and Harvard Medical School, Boston & Central European University, Budapest)

was awarded the prize “for his pioneering contributions to the development of complex network science, in particular for his seminal work on scale-free networks, the preferential attachment model, error and attack tolerance in complex networks, controllability of complex networks, the physics of social ties, communities, and human mobility patterns, genetic, metabolic, and biochemical networks, as well as applications in network biology and network medicine”.

Barabási is a pioneer in network science. He played a leading role in the development of this new area of science, not only at its beginning, but also taking an active part in many of its major advances and breakthroughs in the past two decades. His first breakthrough was presented at the turn of the century, in 1999, with the discovery (together with Reka Albert) that many real-world networks exhibit a scale-free structure, with the number of interactions of each component spanning orders of magnitude. This discovery exposed a deep universality, observed in networks from social, biological and technological domains. In a broader perspective, this discovery in 1999 is often considered as the birth of network science. He went further to introduce a statistical physics model for the emergence of scale-free phenomena, the preferential attachment model, one of the most cited papers in the history of physics. His work has connected researchers from different disciplines in an interdisciplinary way. In biology – his work has shown the crucial role of genetic, metabolic and biochemical networks in modeling cellular processes. In medicine – he has introduced the concept of network medicine, linking pathologies based on shared genetic roots, and predicting novel therapeutics. In social systems – his works have uncovered the underlying physics of social ties, communities and human mobility patterns.

The impact of Barabási’s research activity is well beyond the borders of physics, touching many interdisciplinary fields, representing a major extension in the range of applicability of statistical physics, reflected by the 270000 citations that his work has received. It embraces a vast array of research areas including social network analysis, internet and information technology, and biology and medicine. He contributed to the evidence that the scaling of networks is not a feature of man-made systems only, but characterizes e.g. metabolic networks as well. Today the concepts and tools introduced by him in network science are used on a daily basis by a huge number of scientists to study the millions of networks characterizing living and man-made complex systems. 

Angelo Vulpiani (Sapienza University, Rome)

was award the prize “for his seminal contributions to statistical and nonlinear physics, touching fundamentally important issues in dynamical systems theory and statistical mechanics, including the mechanism of stochastic resonance, multifractality of invariant sets of dynamical systems, the dynamics and multifractal properties of turbulent flows, chaos in Hamiltonian systems, and the limits of predictability in complex systems”.

Vulpiani is an outstanding physicist who has made seminal contributions to statistical and nonlinear physics. His research interests are distinguished by their strong connection to fundamental issues of statistical mechanics and to the works of classics like Boltzmann, Kolmogorov and Khinchin.

Over the years he has also built up a strong environment in Rome with many young researchers who have gone on to contribute elsewhere. Furthermore, he is a prolific author of books for the general scientific public, both in Italian and in English, as well as the author of several well-regarded monographs. His immense productivity is reflected by almost 500 co-authored scientific publications.  Most relevant, some of his works mark major break-throughs in their field or have opened up completely new fields of research. The most prominent example is stochastic resonance which, in 1981, was introduced by him together with Roberto Benzi, Alfonso Sutera, and the current (2021) physics nobel prize winner Giorgio Parisi. This developed into an immensely active research area afterwards.

In 1984, Vulpiani (together with Paladin) showed that multifractality (originally defined by Mandelbrot in a purely mathematical setting) is of relevance for the characterization of invariant sets in dynamical systems, and also in turbulent flows. Today, the concept of multifractality is an inherent part of dynamical systems theory and also highly relevant for data analysis, where it has moved into the time domain, i.e. it is used to characterize a variety of measured time series observed in many applications. Other important works of his are his contributions to chaos in Hamiltonian systems and the equipartition of energy (follow-ups of the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam problem), his contributions to diffusion and transport in various nonlinear settings, and his repeated efforts to understanding, defining, and investigating complexity in general.

The prizes of the Division also contain the EPS-SNPD Early Career Prize, which is traditionally shared by two younger scientists and which was also awarded in Trieste. This year the prize went to Federico Battiston and Caterina De Bacco.

Federico Battiston (Central European University, Vienna)

was honoured for “for his outstanding work on nonlinear dynamics and emergent collective phenomena in multilayer and higher-order networks, including diffusion, synchronization, social and evolutionary processes”.

Caterina De Bacco (Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Tuebingen)

was honoured for “her outstanding work on statistical physics of random walkers on random graphs, stochastic search processes, routing optimization on networks and effective algorithms for community detection”.

Due to the Covid-19 situation, the conference in Trieste was a hybrid conference, with many participants participating online, but some participants being present in person as well. The photograph shows the prize winners and some members of the Board of the EPS Statistical and Nonlinear Physics Division. From left to right: Federico Battiston, Erik Aurell, Angelo Vulpiani, Albert-László Barabási (on screen), Christian Beck, Caterina De Bacco, Raul Toral, Guido Caldarelli.

Travel grants are available from EuroScience for postdocs in any field of physics to attend ESOF2020 from 5-9 July 2020 in Trieste (IT).
More information can be found here: https://www.euroscience.org/calls/travel-grants-to-esof2020-heraeus/.

The deadline to apply is 18 November 2019.