SPG/SSP/SPS: Schweizerische Physikalische Gesellschaft
The SPS is actively organising and supporting a variety of projects and events:
- The SPS Annual Meeting 2023 was held in the week of 4-8 September at the University of Basel, jointly with the Austrian Physical Society. At the meeting, a historical symposium on the 400th Anniversary of Blaise Pascal took place.
- The 2nd edition of the "Women in Physics Career Symposium" (WiP) was held as a satellite event and organized by Marc Janoschek (PSI) and its organizing committee (see link).
- We fostered our communications and outreach activities by keeping the outstanding level of the SPG Mitteilungen, preparing the new web page, issuing monthly Newsletters, and posting selected entries on our new LinkedIn channel.
- The SPS supports and sponsors events to encourage the future generation of scientists at different levels from high school to Bachelor and Master students, and PhDs, e.g., the Swiss Physics Olympiad, the International Young Physicists Tournament, the International Physicists Tournament, the Youth@STEM4SF and the Young Talent Day 2023 organized at the Physics Department in Basel on Sept. 4, and the SJF (Schweizer Jugend Forscht).
- The SPS has undergone discussions to prepare a reorganization of sections which resulted in the opening of the new section on Energy and Sustainability section, Medical Physics inclusion in the Applied Physics Section, while the focus remains on Biophysics and Soft Matter for the section which before included it; the creation of the Commission on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, now chaired by Philipp Schmidt-Wellenburg (PSI), which will organize the WiP career symposium and activities about neighbour societies and IUPAP.
The “SPG Mitteilungen” (“Communications de la SSP”, “SPS Communications”) was published 3 times in 2023 (No. 69-71). It is the most important SPS publication for disseminating information about ongoing activities within society and reviewing scientific progress in various areas. High-class articles are published in specific article categories, i.e. “Progress in Physics”, “Milestones in Physics”, “Physics Anecdotes & Personal Recollections”, “Physics and Society”, “Physicists in Industry” or “History and Philosophy of Physics”. A paper copy of the SPG Mitteilungen is distributed to all members and electronic version can be downloaded from our webpage a few weeks after the release of the printed journal and it is also distributed through LinkedIn.
About every month, the electronic SPS Newsletter is sent to all subscribers with news at the Swiss, European, and global levels. Additionally, a LinkedIn channel has been created to advertise SPS activities and other publications. News items inform about current research, prize winners, conferences, symposia and more. Besides SPS members, every interested person can subscribe to these information channels.
The SPS Annual Meeting 2023 was held in the week of 4-8 September at the University of Basel with the Austrian Physical Society. More than 520 participants attended, and more than 320 oral and 63 poster presentations were given. The conference opened with the second edition of the special session "Physics Funding in Switzerland"; the symposium on the 400th anniversary of Blaise Pascal, with 4 outstanding talks providing an idea of how computing resources evolved from the Pascaline to modern computers such as those at the super-calculus centre CSCS in Lugano. The meeting included, as usual, the General Assembly, which elected two new honorary members Bernhard Braunecker and Ruth Durrer, the award ceremony, plenary talks, and several topical sessions covering a broad range of research fields. The meeting hosted the Award ceremony, including the Charpak-Ritz prize presentation, and and Poster sessions. Ten companies had exhibition spaces. The 2nd Women in Physics Career Symposium was organized as a satellite event of the annual meeting.
A summary of these events is in the SPS Mitteilungen n. 71.
Every year, the SPS invites to the Young Talent Day (YTD) the young people who participated with success in Swiss and international physics science competitions. The 2023 edition took place on Sept. 4 on the sidelines of the SPS annual meeting. About 20 Swiss students have been welcomed at the Physics Department of the University of Basel for an exciting guided tour through the nano- & Quantum physics labs. After lively discussions and exchanges during lunch, the students attended the Pascal symposium.
A) The SPS and the SFP (Société Française de Physique) sponsor a joint prize named the Charpak–Ritz Award. This prize is given alternately to a French physicist (in odd years) and a Swiss Physicist (in even years). In 2023, the winner was Bruno Mansoulié, nominated for his seminal experimental contributions leading to the discovery of the Higgs particle. For more information, see here .
B) The SPS is a member of the European Physical Society (EPS). As such, we distribute the EPS publication "Europhysics News" to all our members.
Michel Calame is the chair of the European Physics Journal (EPJ) Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC). The Annual Joint meeting of the SAC, Editors-in-Chief and Steering Committee of EPJ was hosted at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (EMPA) near Zürich in April 2023. More than 40 representatives of national physical societies, EPJ publishers and many of the journals' Chief Editors gathered under the chairmanship of the Swiss Physical Society President J. Chang, who gave a welcome address. They discussed all aspects of modern scientific publishing - ranging from individual journal development to improving support for early career researchers. The invited talk of the 'EPS Young Minds' provided some excellent insights on the next generation of scientists constraints and opportunities in this context.
The 2023 marks the 25th anniversary of the launch of the EPJ and, as part of this year's special initiatives, EPJ expressly invites young career researchers organizing, specifically, meetings for their peers to apply for sponsorship.
Hans Peter Beck (Uni Bern) is the Swiss Delegate at the EPS Council and the liaison officer of SPS and SCNAT in IUPAP. Christophe Rossel is the Chair of the IUPAP working group WG16 "Physics and Industry" and Barbora Bruant Gilejova is a member, and C. Rossel is also the Chair of the EPS Technology and Innovation group and SCNAT delegate in 2023. Bernhard Braunecker is the Delegate of SPS in SATW. The Swiss representations in the IUPAP commissions in the period 2021-2024 are:
C6 Biological Physics - Member - Suliana Manley (EPFL)
C9 Magnetism - Member - Oksana Zaharko (PSI)
C11 Particles and Fields - Chair - Florencia Canelli (U ZH)
C16 Plasma Physics - Member - Christian Theiler (EPFL).
The SPS Awards, amounting to CHF 5000 each, are given every year to young physicists at an early stage of their career (PhD student - early post-doc). The 2023 winners are as follows:
• SPS Award in all physics domains (sponsored by ABB): Simone Gargiulo
• SPS Award in Condensed Matter Physics (sponsored by IBM): Katharina Kaiser
• SPS Award in Applied Physics (sponsored by Oerlikon Surface Solutions AG): Vivek Maradia
• SPS Award related to Metrology (sponsored by METAS): Mohammad J. Bereyhi
• SPS Award in Computational Physics (sponsored by COMSOL): Michele Simoncelli
• SPS Award in relation to Energy technology (sponsored by Hitachi Energy Switzerland AG): Shih-Chi Yang.
SPS also sponsors two awards for the best winners of the Swiss Physics Olympiad "SPG Nachwuchsförderpreis") and two awards for Swiss Youth in Science ("Jugendpreis der SPG").
The Swiss Physical Society is supporting young physicists via the Young Physicists Forum (YPF). YPF fosters links across all student associations at Swiss universities and is organizing a yearly event. In 2023, the topic chosen was ‘Medical Physics’. It took place on 26-28 April at the University of Bern. A detailed program is here.
The International Physics Tournament (IPT) 2023 in Paris, a competition for university and PhD students supported by SPS, was the 15th edition of this international event involving more than 20 countries. The SPS strongly supports this initiative. It set up interviews (see e.g. link) and organized articles to be shared with EPS and APS. This activity is a competition, but it is organized according to principles of cooperation between PhD students and Master students and between teams from different countries worldwide. Some Universities, like ETHZ and EPFL, formally recognise this activity in the students' curricula by recognizing credits the students spend on this.
As a member society of SATW, the SPS supports SATW's main task of early identification of technologies, which may become important for Switzerland’s economy by creating high-level jobs in the next three to five years. The results of the analyses are published every two years in a Technology Outlook Report (TOR), which we bring to the attention of our members.
In 2023, the SPS installed a code of conduct and revised the statutes accordingly.
At the pre-university level, the SPS supports the Swiss Physics Olympiad, and the Swiss and International Young Physics Tournament. The SPS also subsidises an initiative for establishing a Physics Teachers education support.
“Physik im Advent” (PiA) is an online physics Advent calendar, that presents 24 physics experiments or riddles to young pupils, and anyone interested. The experiments can be repeated at home or in the classroom and the outcomes can be uploaded to the PiA homepage to enter a prize draw. It encourages pupils' curiosity and interest in physics and natural sciences. The SPS and SCNAT are promoting PiA in Switzerland in collaboration with the PiA creators in Germany. SPS also organised French & Italian translations of all experiment descriptions and solutions. In 2023, there were 69'469 registered participants from 72 countries worldwide (about 1200 in Switzerland), and over one million clicks on the PiA link and videos on YouTube. The participant number has been increasing from 600 in 2019 to 1500 in 2022 despite a slight drop was observed in 2023. Still, the participant number in Switzerland is in the top 3 of the 80 participating countries, after Germany and Austria.
For the 2023 edition, the SPS has distributed awards to 30 individual winners and 4 school classes, that have been drawn amongst the best participants from Switzerland. The prizes for the individual winners were an educational "Fun with Magnets" set from supermagnete.ch and the quantum physics board game "HOP!" developed in Geneva by Dr João S. Ferreira. The prizes for the 4 winning school classes, supported by SPS, were class excursions to the science education facilities CERN, Technorama, IBM quantum lab, and PSI Schülerlabor iLAB.
SPS contributed to increasing the “Swissness” of the national STEM expertise and shaping high school science curricula by supporting the pioneer project “Youth at STEM for Sustainable Future” Youth@STEM4SF. A successful pilot was realised at the Gymnase Bugnon–Sévelin in Lausanne with 55 students, 3 science teachers and 5 (2 female) role models from research (Uni Bern, CERN) and industry (ABB, Solstis) on 11th of May 2023 under the umbrella of UNESCO International Year of Basic Sciences for Sustainable Development. Showing physics and STEM in action for sustainable development inspired 30% of students, especially girls, to consider STEM-related careers; and half of the students to act as ambassadors for the role of science in society in their future non-scientific careers. Youth@STEM4SF has been recognised by education21, the Swiss federal authority for high school education on sustainable development, as a perfect example of a pioneer program implementing a new education plan for Swiss gymnasiums.