Issue 1, 2014
Issue 2, 2009
To celebrate the successful establishment of Nordita in Stockholm, and to give our Nordic friends and colleagues an opportunity to view Nordita in its new environment, a one-day event was organized on Friday April 24, 2009. In the morning Nordita staff members gave lectures on current scientific activities and this was followed in the afternoon by talks on the history and future role of a Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics.
At the end of the afternoon session Alan Luther, who retired at the end of 2008, was honored for his achievements and long service as a Nordita Professor. The activities were rounded off by a banquet cruise in the Stockholm archipelago.
We are looking forward to welcoming three new assistant professors.
Sabine and Troels will be arriving in the fall but Petri has been granted leave of absence until January 1, 2011. In the meantime, Drubaditya Mitra (currently in London) will be acting assistant professor for astrophysical dynamos.
The recruitment process for the full professorship at Nordita is moving along. The position has been offered to the candidate ranked highest by the appointment committee.
The next NORDITA Master Class in Physics will be in Hillerød (Denmark) and will run from 26 July 2009 to 01 August 2009. This is a summer school for undergraduate students from the Nordic and Baltic countries.
→ Details
The first evaluation of Nordita in Stockholm was carried out during the spring of 2009. The evaluation committee of
came on a site-visit on April 2-3 and their report has now been approved by the NOS-N joint committee of the Nordic Natural Science research councils.
The report is generally very positive and affirms Nordita's important role as a joint Nordic infrastructure for theoretical physics. Quoting from the executive summary:
``... NORDITA has re-invented itself in its new environment, to the advantage of the Nordic research communities in theoretical physics and related fields. The in-house research programs are of the highest quality and attract considerable external funding...' '
The full text of the evaluation report as well as Nordita's self-evaluation document are available at www.nordita.org/aboutus/evaluation.
The next meeting of the Nordita Board will be 3-4 September, starting with scientific presentations and informal discussions on the Thursday, and then the actual board meeting on the Friday.
17-21 August 2009
Several different types of surveys are currently aiming at detecting signatures from the era beyond redshift 6, which is when the reionization of the Universe happened. Each of these surveys is at the cutting edge of what is possible, and detecting the desired signatures will be challenging. However, by comparing or cross-correlating the same areas on the sky between different data sets, a clearer detection may be possible.
→ Details
24 - 28 August in Heidelberg
The Pencil Code User Meeting 2009 will be 24-28 August in Heidelberg. Please register on: http://agenda.albanova.se/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=1190.
The purpose of the meeting is to bring the core developers together and to allow others to interact with them and learn more about the Pencil Code, which is now hosted by google code http://pencil-code.googlecode.com/. The Pencil Code User Meeting is an annual meeting dedicated to the Pencil Code. The purpose of the meeting is to bring regular users and core developers together to discuss scientific and technical progress since the last meeting, to instigate collaborative projects and to allow new users to learn more about the code and to interact with other users and developers. The Pencil Code Meeting 2009 will be held August 24-28 2009 at the Max-Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) in Heidelberg, Germany.
Currently running (15 June to 31 July 2009)
The exciting prospect of exploring the Higgs sector of the Standard Model and its presumed extensions at the LHC has renewed interest in electroweak baryogenesis (EWB) and the electroweak phase transition (EWPT). At the same time, constraints on CP violation, which is generically present in extensions of the Standard Model, will be tightened by new Electric Dipole Moment (EDM) experiments. Further into the future, there is the possibility of probing a first-order electroweak phase transition directly using the space-based gravitational wave detector LISA.
→ Details and application form
17 August 2009 to 11 September 2009
The aim of this workshop is to bring together a group of theorist with a broad and varied range of competences in numerical techniques, low energy effective theories, conformal field theory and lattice models, but with quantum Hall phenomena as a common interest. Main focus topics will be non-abelian states and quantum computation, and quantum Hall effects in both graphene and atomic condensates.
→ Details and application form
25 September 2009 to 25 October 2009
Understanding the origin of solar and stellar magnetic fields is one of the central problems of physics and astrophysics, and a key to understanding the cosmic magnetism, in general. There are two main difficulties in studying this problem: 1) magnetic fields are generated by turbulent dynamos in convection zones below the visible surface, not accessible by direct observations; 2) solar and stellar magnetic activity is a multi-scale phenomenon, involving physical processes on very small scales, probably, below the current observational limit, and at the same time showing remarkable large-scale spatial and temporal organizations over a whole star. The prime target of our investigation is the Sun, which serves as the Rosetta Stone in this field and holds the key to unlocking the secrets of magnetic field generation in the Universe. The most detailed observational data and theoretical models have been obtained for the Sun, but a very significant progress has also been achieved in observations and theories of magnetism on other stars.
→ Details and application form
2-29 November 2009
This event combines a school, a scientific program and a conference in multiscale modelling in numerical analysis, nano and material science, chemistry and biology.
The purpose of this event is to join a school, a scientific program and a conference in multiscale modeling where teachers, students and scientists in computational science and engineering will be brought together to present, discuss and solve problems in areas of reserach involving multiple scales.
→ Details and application form
The current list of Nordita visitors is always available in graphical form on www.nordita.org/visits On that data base you can also see past and future visitors. Optionally you can also click to obtain a display of all program visitors.
Ms Violaine Auger from the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris has just completed her Internship at Nordita. Her project report is available as preprint NORDITA-2009-032.
Dr Enikö Madarassy (PhD from University of Newcastle) is spending a 3-month visit at Nordita to work on turbulent diffusion in shear flows.
The Pencil Code has been used for teaching on a number of occasions. Some online material is available through the Numerical Experiments page.
The warm weather in Stockholm has stimulated some of the Nordita scientific activities out onto the lawn. A white-board helps the scientific communication. The sketches show knotted field lines with linkage numbers 3 and 2.
→ Link to electronic preprints: www.nordita.org/preprints
If you have information about meetings or other items that would be useful to include in Nordita News, please send it to Anne Jifält, Nordita, email: anne@kth.se.