IUPAP 100 Photo Contest

At a glance

Prizes

1st Prize     Entry ID 20029. Title: “Chasing Ghost Particles at the South Pole”. Author: Yuya Makino  with address in Madison WI, USA

2nd Prize   Entry ID 20094. Title: “Foldscope–A revolutionary microscope”. Author: Arpan Chowdhury with address in West Bengal, India.

3rd Prize   Entry ID  20023. Title: “Surface Tension”  Author: Richard Germain  with address in Québec, Canada

Honorable mentions

Entry ID 20097.  Title: “A Room Full Of Physics”. Author: Soumyasikha Manna with address in West Bengal,

Entry ID   20014. Title: “Raman spectroscopy of solids”. Author: David Lockwood with address in Ontario, Canada

Entry ID 20010:  Title: “Imagining spacetime singularities by burning film”. Author: Valerio Faraoni with address in Québec, Canada

Beyond our eyes

Prizes

1st Prize    Entry ID: 10019. Title: “Anatomy of a Drying Drop”. Author: Paul Lilin with address in Massachusetts, USA

2nd Prize Entry ID: 20073. Title: “Blooming Life”. Author: Guowen Sun with address in Gansu Province, China

3rd Prize  Entry ID: 10025. Title: “Surviving by drops”. Author: Isabel Sánchez, with address in Granada, Spain 

Honorable mentions

Entry ID: 10014. Title: “A glimpse inside a nuclear fusion reactor”. Author: Curdin Wüthrich with address in Ecublens VD, Switzerland.

Entry ID: 10008. Title: “The EYES of the LHC where Bosons travel”. Author: Erwin Van hove with address in Divonne les Bains, France

Entry ID: 10021. Title: “A…black hole ground state”. Author: Kimon  Moratis with address in Paris, France.

Links to the photos/images and descriptive texts provided by the authors

At a glance

“Chasing Ghost Particles at the South Pole” by Yuya Makino

The picture shows an IceCube winterover walking towards the telescope facility. Every year, two winterovers are selected and sent to the South Pole for an entire year as the telescope operators for IceCube. The South Pole is one of the most harsh environments and isolated places on Earth. For more than half the year, the Amundsen-Scott Station at the South Pole is completely isolated from the outside world. The six month polar night has darkness 24-7. IceCube is the world’s largest neutirno telescope, using the 3,000m deep ice sheet there. Five thousand extremely-sensitive optical sensors are deployed deep in the ice, over a cubic kilometer, seeking faint signals of neutrinos. The temperature goes bellow -100F in winter and the winterovers can be easily lost without flags on the route in the darkness. At the bottom of Earth, doing science is even harder than normal, but it is exciting.

“Foldscope–A revolutionary microscope” by Arpan Chowdhury

A Foldscope is an optical microscope that can be assembled from simple components, with a sheet of paper and a lens. It was developed by Manu Prakash and designed to cost less than US$1 to build. It is one of such inventions of optical physics which aims to make cheap and easy tools available for scientific use in the developing world and underdeveloped countries where medical and experimental resources and funds are scarce. It is part of the “frugal science”, a philosophy that facilitates the distribution of affordable scientific tools in order to make physics accessible and intelligible to anyone reciding at any corner of the globe. It comes in a kit with multiple lenses that provide magnification from 140X to 2,000X, including magnets that can be stuck onto the Foldscope to attach it to a smartphone, allowing the user to take pictures of the magnification. It enables the spotting of organisms such as Leishmania donovani and Escherichia coli, as well as malarial parasites. A Foldscope can be printed on a standard A4 sheet of paper and assembled in seven minutes. Foldscope can survive(claimed by Manu Prakash) harsh conditions, even if it is being thrown in water or dropped from a five-story building. The girl(in the picture) named Puja, lives in a tribal village in Jharkhand, India. She posed with her Foldscope which was given to her by an NGO that distributed Foldscopes in schools for a science awareness campaign. Unfortunately Puja could not remeber the name of the NGO. But the picture celebrates the magic of Physics,hovering even at the remotest part of the earth.

“Surface Tension”  by Richard Germain 

Water molecules attract each other because of their polarity. The molecules at the water-air interface, do not undergo the interaction of other water molecules above them and exert contraction forces that generate tension on the surface of the liquid. This tends to minimize the interface area, allows the surface to resist external forces, and allows objects denser than water to be supported. This effect of surface tension is commonly observed in certain insects which move on the surface of the water without necessarily floating, such as water striders. In this photo, a safety pin has been delicately placed on the surface of a basin of water. The surface tension keeps the pin from sinking but the surface of the water is bent by the weight of the pin. At the same time, a light box with an array of small black squares painted on its surface was used to illuminate the pin and the water. The deformed surface acts as a convex mirror around the pin and reflects a reduced size virtual image of the light box grid.

“A Room Full Of Physics” by Soumyasikha Manna

This picture is a token of the all-pervasive role of physics in human affairs.I captivated the moment when I paid a visit at a remote Sunderbans island health centre. The syringe, the stethoscope along with the solar charger all are the most significant contributions which involve different laws and theories of physics.This is for me perhaps one of the best examples of how physics contributes in our daily lives. We can not live a day without a help of physics. It does not hide itself with the most complicated formulas and calculations, that is the field where the scientists contribute and perhaps we, the ABC can only enjoy the benefits only and words are not enough to praise the brains who work tirelessly to make the world a better place with the help of science. I took this photo in one of the remotest areas of the most mysterious mangrove in the world, where there are no professional doctors have a chamber, the 20000+ population must rely on few nurses from the health center and few self-acclaimed doctors (not with a proper medical degree), but medicines reach there by the government, the nurses are equipped with few medical essentials like a Stethoscope, few life-saving medicines and these are all contributions of physics directly or indirectly. Electricity is scarce in this island. So they must depend on solar energy for a continuous flow of electricity and everyone knows to convert solar energy to light energy was the brainwork of physicists.

“Raman spectroscopy of solids” by David Lockwood 

Dr. David Lockwood is seen aligning a laser beam from an argon ion laser, which can be seen behind his right elbow. The laser power supply is the big ‘box’ on the floor at his left knee. The laser beam is being set up for an inelastic light scattering (otherwise known as Raman scattering) experiment that is to be carried out with the aid of an unusually high resolution (2 m focal length) double grating spectrometer, which can be seen right at the left of the photograph. Other related equipment needed for the experiments such as mirrors and lenses is shown in the foreground on an anti-vibration optical workbench and also on another such bench behind Dr. Lockwood. The equipment is being used to ascertain the vibrational and magnetic properties of solids. The solid being studied is placed at the focal point of a lens that is placed at the conclusion of the green laser track that appears in the photograph because of Rayleigh scattering (otherwise known as elastic light scattering) from the air. The Raman equipment is also used to measure light emission such as photoluminescence from solids under laser excitation.

“Imagining spacetime singularities by burning film” by Valerio Faraoni

35 mm slide film was burned to visualize heat damage in a 2-dimensional medium. Heat opens up channels that suffer damage in apparently random directions. I wanted to visualize non-intuitive physics to help imagining analogies for spacetime singularities in general relativity. Classical spacetime singularities are conceived as sharp “cuts’’ in spacetime but, if the latter is inhomogeneous at small scales, they could have a complicated structure as in this film. Removing these singularities requires quantizing gravity or replacing it with some emergent structure. Singularities could be replaced by infinitely many curves along which spacetime is “damaged’’ but not sharply cut, corresponding to large but finite curvature. At smaller and smaller scales, one would never encounter a sharp cut but the spacetime continuum would “fracture’’ at many neighbouring locations. I am trying to formulate mathematically this analogy.

Beyond our eyes

“Anatomy of a Drying Drop” by Paul Lilin

A millimetric drop containing water and nanoparticles is deposited on a glass surface and left to dry. As water evaporates from the drop, the nanoparticles assemble into a thin solid deposit which eventually covers the entire drop area, like the pigments in a drop of watercolor. In this unedited photograph, the deposit is imaged from below under a dim diffuse light by a microscope equipped with a red color filter and a camera. Regularly spaced radial cracks create a flower-like pattern in the deposit; those cracks are similar in origin to the craquelures observed in ancient paintings. In addition to the cracks, light diffusing through the deposit reveals a complex internal structure of shear bands, which are formed during drying as the nanoparticles shift and rearrange. Finally, the deposit bends upward and out of focus like a flower blooming. Cracks, shear bands and bending deformation are fascinating physical phenomena whose interplay create the rich textures of this captivating photograph.

“Blooming Life” by Guowen Sun

This picture was taken by a scanning electron microscope (SEM, FEI Apreo S, USA) of the Electron Microscopy Center of Lanzhou University, and was obtained by simple color matching with PS software in the later stage. The material in the picture is a metal oxide material (CoO) synthesized by a hydrothermal method. When the author first saw the sample under an electron microscope, he was struck by its beautiful shape. The world is suffering from COVID-19, The author hopes that every scientific researcher can face all this with a positive attitude like this flower, and can calm down to feel the beauty of physics, the beauty of materials, and the knowledge of things. The author also sincerely wishes the 100 years of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, and hopes that physics will lead mankind to the future.

“Surviving by drops” by Isabel Sánchez

The surface of many plants (leaves and flowers) can retain water droplets, or even be hydrophobic. The latter is a phenomenon that, at micrometre-scale, can be illustrated using an Environmental Scanning Electron Microscope (ESEM). ESEM is capable of providing high resolution electronic images of samples containing water.” In situ” condensation experiments have been performed by cooling the surface of the samples at 2 Celsius degrees and using 5.3 Torr partial pressure of water vapor in the chamber. The false-colour ESEM image shows the wet stigma papillae (pinkish) of the summer flower of “Moricandia arvensi”. The pollen (orange) needs to be rehydrated on the stigma in order to initiate germination. “Moricandia arvensi” changes the shape and color of the flowers during summer, the driest season; these changes could be related to water stress, among other factors. The ability of some plant surfaces to retain some water even at low availability conditions is of particular interest for those that survive in arid or semiarid regions. The microphotography has been coloured with adobe Photoshop 2021 and the effect of water has been enhanced to make it easily recognizable.

“A glimpse inside a nuclear fusion reactor” by Curdin Wüthrich

Nuclear fusion reactors are considered one of the most promising paths to long term sustainable electricity production on earth. The most advanced reactor concept to reach it is called a tokamak based on magnetic confinement fusion in a doughnut-shaped torus. Such an experimental reactor exists at the Swiss Plasma Center. The goal is to reproduce conditions similar to the sun’s surface. Hence, confined plasma is very hot with more than 10 mio. °C, hence hard to see and measure. Also, due to the neutron irradiation, no person can directly observe it during the experiment. This ultra-wide-angle, unfiltered camera view gives for the first time a full view inside the TCV reactor. The plasma appears mostly purple because it is the dominant line emission from Deuterium gas constituting the plasma. Discharges in the TCV reactor only last for about 1-2 seconds. However, for plasma time scales, a lot is happening during this time, which I want to photographically illustrate in my submissions. 

“The EYES of the LHC where Bosons travel” by Erwin Van hove

This picture shows the cross section of the LHC dipole magnet, in a CERN workshop. The dynamic view (3 D Lines) is the result of a long exposure (2 seconds) and changing focus distance (changing manually slowly and progressively the focus point, on the camera objective, on a tripod).  

“A…black hole ground state” by Kimon  Moratis

Instead of interpreting artistically an image acquired through scientific observation, I decided to create art using one of the most important results obtained during my PhD. More specifically we investigated the parameters which govern the switching from a heavy to a light hole ground state in a semiconductor quantum dot. Through this study we demonstrated that the mixing of the light-hole with the split-off band, results to the renormalization of spin expectation values along both z and x axis. This was confirmed by numerical simulations using k.p theory and the development of an analytical model, through which we calculated the spin renormalization functions. In the uploaded image i depict Newton’s fractal for the expression which gives the spin expectation value along z axis, as a function of the light hole presence probability in a mixed light-hole – split-off state. Newton’s method is implemented by home-made codes and the fractal is mapped by the number of iterations required for the convergence of a root candidate. This image was created using exclusively python and matplotlib.