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EPJ H Highlight - Mid-twentieth-century physics in the home of Galileo
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- Published on 10 February 2023
Breakthroughs made at the Institute of Physics near Florence before 1950 include Fermi statistics and the first electronic coincidence circuits
Florence was a flourishing centre for fundamental physics research throughout most of the twentieth century. Roberto Casalbuoni, Daniele Dominici and Massimo Mazzoni – all physicists currently working there – have reviewed the history of the city’s Institute of Physics for the journal EPJ H: Historical Perspectives on Contemporary Physics, concentrating on the important decades of the 1920s to 1960s.
EPJ D Topical review - Theory and molecular simulations of plasma sputtering, transport and deposition processes
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- Published on 03 February 2023
A new Topical Review published in EPJD provides an overview of the basic theory of sputtering with recent models, focussing in particular on sputtered atom energy distribution functions. Models such as Monte-Carlo, kinetic Monte-Carlo, and classical Molecular Dynamics simulations are presented due to their ability to describe the various processes involved in sputtering, transport and deposition processes.
EPJ E Highlight - Machine learning could help kites and gliders to harvest wind energy
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- Published on 02 February 2023
Using trial-and-error, machine learning algorithms could enable flying wind harvesters to dynamically adjust their orientations, allowing them to account for unpredictable turbulence and improve their performances.
Airborne wind energy (AWE) is a lightweight technology which uses flying devices including kites and gliders to harvest power from the atmosphere. To maximise the energy they extract, these devices need to precisely control their orientations to account for turbulence in Earth’s atmosphere. Through new research published in EPJ E, Antonio Celani and colleagues at the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics, Italy, demonstrate how a Reinforcement Learning algorithm could significantly boost the ability of AWE devices to account for turbulence.
EPJ A Topical Collection: Light Clusters in Nuclei and Nuclear Matter: Nuclear Structure and Decay, Heavy Ion Collisions, and Astrophysics
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- Published on 02 February 2023
Guest Editors: David Blaschke, Hisashi Horiuchi, Masaaki Kimura, Gerd Röpke and Peter Schuck
Clustering in nuclei and nuclear matter is an interesting aspect which was intensely worked out during the last two decades. It concerns not only exotic nuclei such as Hoyle-like states, but leads to a better description of general aspects of nuclear structure and reactions. In particular, clustering is essential to understand fission and alpha decay, as well as heavy ion collisions from low to highest energies. In astrophysics, the thermodynamic properties of stellar matter below saturation density, transport properties, and the evolution of compact stellar objects are determined by clustering of nuclear matter. Contributions of this emerging field are collected in this Topical Collection.
In Memory of Prof Amit Dutta
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- Published on 27 January 2023
It is with great sadness that we learn of the sudden passing of Professor Amit Dutta (Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India), member of the Editorial Board of EPJB. An elected Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Bengaluru, Prof Dutta was a member of the Physics Department at IIT Kanpur since 2003, having obtained his PhD from Jadavpur University in 2000. He was a post-doctoral fellow at the Max-Plank-Institut fur Physik Komplexer Systeme, Dresden and the Institut fur Theoretishe Physik, Universitat Wurzburg, and his research interests were in the fields of quantum phase transitions, non-equilibrium dynamics of quantum many body systems and quantum information.
EPJ Plus Focus Point on Memristive Chaotic Circuits and Systems
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- Published on 24 January 2023
Guest Editors: Qiang Lai, Xiao-Wen Zhao & Jacques Kengne
The memristor was theoretically postulated by Chua in 1971 and physically realized by the HP Labs team in 2008. Its unique nonlinear features actively promote the generation of chaos and other interesting dynamical behavior and sets new challenges in applications. This topical issue aims to collect some new ideas, methods, and recent results so as to shed some light on the future research directions concerning the design, analysis, and novel applications of related chaotic systems. Overall it makes a timely and valuable contribution to broadly advancing science and technology using memristors and memristive circuits.
All articles are available here and are freely accessible until 18 March 2023. For further information, read the Editorial.
EPJ D Highlight - Alain Aspect: The physicist who made entanglement an experimental reality
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- Published on 23 January 2023
For Einstein and other physicists of his generation, the strongly counter-intuitive features of quantum mechanics were very hard to accept, given that our intuition is based on the classical world around us. This EPJ D Topical Issue examines the discoveries, motivations, and continuing legacy of Alain Aspect: the physicist whose experiments, along with those of John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger, have made that quantum entanglement, an essentially non-classical feature, is now also an experimental reality, exploited in science and technology.
EPJ Plus Highlight - Citizen Science: From the cosmos to the classroom
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- Published on 18 January 2023
An extensive network of cosmic ray detectors allows high school students in Italy to contribute to cutting-edge particle physics research
Citizen science projects offer the general public, or segments of that public such as school students, an opportunity to take part in scientific research. The Extreme Energy Events (EEE) Project in Italy is a cooperation between particle physicists studying cosmic rays and school students, and their teachers, throughout the country.
This has the twin aims of bringing cosmic ray research into schools and setting up a country-wide ‘open laboratory’ of particle detectors. One of the lead researchers from the EEE Project consortium, Silvia Pisano of the Italian Centro Fermi and Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati of INFN, Rome, Italy, has summarised the results from about 20 years of this project in a new paper in EPJ Plus.
EPJ ST issue: Collective behavior of nonlinear dynamical oscillators
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- Published on 16 January 2023
This topical issue collects contributions of recent achievements and scientific progress related to the collective behavior of nonlinear dynamical oscillators. The individual papers focus on different questions of present-day interest in this topic.
All articles are available here and are freely accessible until 16 March 2023. For further information read the Editorial by Sajad Jafari, Bocheng Bao, Christos Volos, Fahimeh Nazarimehr & Han Bao ”Collective behavior of nonlinear dynamical oscillators” Eur. Phys. J. Spec. Top. 231, 3957–3960 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1140/epjs/s11734-022-00725-0
EPJ Plus Focus Point on Uncertainty Quantification of Modelling and Simulation in Physics and Related Areas: From Theoretical to Computational Techniques
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- Published on 16 January 2023
Guest Editors: Juan Carlos Cortés, Tomás Caraballo, Carla M.A. Pinto
The main goal of this topical article collection is to present new advances on theoretical and computational techniques for uncertainty quantification of modelling and simulation in relevant problems appearing in physics sciences. Many important laws in Physics are formulated by means of equations -mainly differential equations- whose input data is set after experimental measurements, therefore containing uncertainties. Apart from this fact, there often are model parameters whose nature is not known deterministically but randomly because of ignorance and inherent complexity of the physical phenomenon under study. This approach motivates the necessity of treating classical equations in Physics by considering uncertainties in their formulations. This approach is currently a cutting-edge topic whose rigorous analysis requires to masterly combine Physics, Probability and Computing, not just to solve exact or numerically the corresponding equations but also to correctly estimate model parameters, perform accurate simulations and interpret the results.
All articles are available here and are freely accessible until 16 March 2023. For further information, read the Editorial.
