Welcome Words

Welcome to IPS 2015

We welcome you to the 61^st annual meeting of the Israeli Physical Society. The conference program reflects our effort to arrange an interesting and diverse meeting for us all. I wish to thank the members of the scientific organizing committee (Yuval Garini, Yaron Oz,Nadav Katz, Yigal Meir, Eytan Grosfeld, Yaron Silberberg, and Dafne Guetta), the help of Rahel Rotberg and Lea Keizer (administration) and Rita Goldner (assistance), and the daily support by our IPS treasurer Yuval Garini, our website master Doron Cohen and our IPS administrator Daniella Gabrielovitch-Margalit. We acknowledge the supporting companies and the extra funds from the Bar Ilan University VP of research, from the Dean of Exact Sciences,  and from the Institute for Nanotechnology (BINA). We highly appreciate our colleagues who volunteered to chair the sessions, and we thank all of you for coming.

I wish us an exciting and scientifically stimulating IPS-2015.

Avi Pe'er, Organizing Chair

From the President of the IPS

On behalf of the Israel Physical Society (IPS), I welcome you to the 61^st annual General Assembly (2015), held this year at Bar Ilan University. The organizing committee, chaired by Avi Pe'er, has put together an exciting program, and I wish us all a stimulating meeting.

As you all know, the IPS is a non-profit association, whose aim is to stimulate physics research and teaching in Israel. In order to enhance the IPS standing, activities and collaborations at the national and international level, we have set last year three goals for the IPS, which we have been pursuing.

Our first goal is to initiate a norm for all physicists in Israel, graduate students, faculty members and scientists at the industry, to register as members of the IPS.  This will enhance significantly the standing of the IPS. It will allow us to establish strong relations with supporting companies, stabilize and increase the IPS budget and its activities, and reduce the registration fees. It will position the IPS as an important institution, such that its opinion on matters related to physics in Israel, ranging from high school physics teaching curriculum to the state budgeting of physics research, will carry weight.

Our second goal is to enhance the activities and participation of physics graduate students in the IPS. We believe that an early strong involvement of the next generation of scientists in the IPS will provide a boost to the IPS and its goals. We need your support for achieving this goal, and would like to ask you to encourage your graduate students to take an active role in the IPS activities. 

As in the previous two years, we will host a meeting for students at the final stages of their undergraduate or beginning of Master studies. For this we invite presentations of physicists from the academy, as well as physicists from the industry to talk about other aspects of physics research. In addition, we bring Ph.D. graduate students to talk about their experience. The meeting will take place at Akko, 7/4-8/4, 2015. We started last year a new program, where the IPS supports graduate students joint meetings initiated by them, in Israel. We ask you to encourage your graduate students to make use of this program.

Our third goal is to enhance the relations with other similar organizations such as the APS and the EPS.

We welcome any idea and suggestion that you may have regarding the IPS activities, please let us know if you have one.

This year we made a decision to open the IPS membership to any institution that has teaching and research activities.

Let me end by wishing all of us an enjoyable and productive year. Our 62^nd General Assembly will be held at Tel Aviv University.

Yaron Oz, President of the IPS