YPF 2022 - Green Energy Physics
08th - 10th APRIL 2022
ETH Zurich
The YPF 2022 in summary
As in previous years, the committee of the Young Physicists Forum (YPF) organised a three-day forum for physics students from all Swiss universities to attend. After two years of online YPF’s due to the pandemic, the 2022 forum could finally take place again as an in-person event. During the timespan from the 8th and until the 10th of April, our committee was able to offer six lectures on the topic of “Green Energy Physics” at the ETH in Zurich as host university.
Here, the expression “Green Energy Physics” served as an umbrella term, covering both renewable energy sources such as solar and wind as well as nuclear energy from fission and fusion, all in the context of a carbon-neutral future of mankind’s energy production. The forum was directly linked to the massive shift in energy supply that is currently happening on a global scale and aimed to present to the audience the role that physics might play in this attempt to solve the imminent energy crisis. This rendered the YPF 2022 perhaps the most contemporary and, undoubtedly, the most political one held so far, a circumstance which may be excused by the highly interesting physics that can be accommodated in a forum on “Green Energy Physics”. We were happy to see that many physics students shared this view, seeing that nearly 40 participants from all throughout Switzerland were willing to spend their weekend in Zurich to attend this YPF, to learn more about the latest innovations in this field and to connect with other like-minded, physics-enthusiastic peers.
The lectures were held by 4 professors, one senior scientist and one PhD student, offering a great mix of perspectives to our audience. Initially, 8 lectures were planned, but as always when planning such an event, a large number of potential lecturers did not respond to our requests and a few more declined. Thankfully, the 6 lecturers who agreed to give a lecture did so very enthusiastically and provided for a highly adequate contextual backbone of our forum.
Apart from the lectures, the program was completed with a Tour of the ETH Main Building and Archive, as well as a tour through the Quantum Device Lab on the ETH Hönggerberg. Having 2 lectures on each day and a tour on Friday and Saturday allowed for a relaxed schedule with additional fun events, like a quiz, and as such offered plenty of room for the students to connect amongst each other, which is indeed the core objective of the YPF.
Looking back at the YPF 2022, it is fair to say that the students all showed a great interest in the topic and the Forum, with some lectures taking far more than the initially planned hour due to the amount of questions asked. The atmosphere was amicable, which shaped a group of initially unfamiliar students into a very pleasant circle of new acquaintances. The students readily exchanged ideas across university and language “borders”, and all of this left us with no doubt that the YPF 2022 was a success and worth our efforts.
Participation in the YPF 2022
The students were invited to participate in the forum via an invitation email sent to all physics student associations of Swiss Universities, which they then shared with their students. In order to participate at this year’s forum, the students were asked to pay a fee of 10 to 50 francs to participate, depending on their individual needs (additional public transportation ticket for two days and/or hotel room for two nights). In total, 39 Participants took part, most of which came from the EPFL and the University of Geneva. Nevertheless, we can proudly announce that all Swiss universities that offer physics as a course of study were represented amongst our participants.
YPF 2022 – in detail and chronological order
The meeting point of this year’s event was on Friday, the 8th of April, at the fountain in the main building, just a minute away from the room where all lectures were held. The YPF committee welcomed the participants, shortly introduced themselves and explained the idea behind this year's event and its organisation. The two lectures on Friday focused on innovative ways to use solar energy.
The starting lecture was given by Prof. David Tilley (University of Zurich), with the title “Semiconductor-Heterojunction Approaches to Solar Water Splitting”. He reviewed the general ideas behind photocatalysis and why the production of Hydrogen is a viable way to store energy. He continued to go into quite some depth about his research and how useful semiconductor materials are constructed. Tilley’s lecture was content-wise perhaps the most challenging, not only because he covered a multitude of approaches and some material science in depth, but also because it was a very chemistry-heavy topic and thus less familiar to most of the participants. Nonetheless, it prompted many questions and was a highly informative lecture.
This was followed by a talk by the PhD student Remo Schäppi, who presented a way to use solar energy to create hydrocarbon fuels. He explained why air-travel is very likely to stay fuel dependent in the foreseeable future and that, in order to decrease the carbon footprint, they work on the synthesis of hydrocarbon fuels for the aviation industry out of the air’s CO2 and water content. He also presented their working prototype in-depth, which is located at the ETH, and impressed with his knowledge of the entire machinery, ranging from the filtering process to gather CO2 and H2O over the flexible focusing of light onto one of two reactor cores, to the materials used in the reactor to induce a maximum gain of CO and H2. These elements are then used on site to synthesise the desired fuels via the well-established Fischer-Tropsch process.
The day was concluded by a tour through the ETH Main Building and the Einstein archives with a view on original hand-written notes of Einstein, both of which were graciously offered by the ETH for free. Both the architectural history and the story of Albert Einstein’s time at the Polytechnikum, as it was called back in the day, allowed the participants to put their time at the ETH into a wider frame.
The two lectures on Saturday focused on the two most prominent ways of gaining nuclear energy. Opening the morning lecture, Prof. Andreas Pautz, head of the Nuclear Energy and Safety Division (NES) at the Paul Scherrer Institut and professor of nuclear engineering at EPFL, held the lecture “New Nuclear Reactor Concepts for Improved Safety and Sustainability: from Generation-III to Generation-IV and beyond”. He showcased various concepts that were developed to drastically reduce nuclear waste and the risk to the general public. He also listed various reasons as to why nuclear energy still plays a major role in securing emission free electricity. This invited students to ask more policy-based questions, which allowed for wide-ranging discussions.
Prof. Pautz was then followed by his colleague, Prof. Christian Theiler, introducing us to fusion energy with a lecture titled “Nuclear Fusion - Basic Concepts, Current Status and Next Steps”. Prof. Theiler discussed the engineering problem of having to contain plasma at multiple million degrees Celsius and how to produce the constituents of said plasma in the first place. He framed these problems by showing current tokamak reactor designs, possible improvements and how the next two major fusion research projects, ITER and DEMO, are implementing these, leading towards the goal of unlimited clean energy.
Having no lectures planned in the afternoon gave us the opportunity to host a little quiz with questions about fundamental physics, fermi problems and the latest political scandals. Although we declared the participation to be voluntary, the majority of people played, which made it all the more enjoyable.
The next official destination was the Quantum Devices Lab on ETH’s Hönggerberg campus, where PhD student Graham Norris of the Wallraff Group was as kind as to offer our audience a tour of their laboratory. The Quantum Device Lab is conducting research on a range of quantum systems and their potential applications, including work on quantum computing and quantum information processing. Graham’s tour offered our participants insight into the venue of world-leading research in this field, represented by a large underground lab filled with cryogenic systems, measurement devices and computers. The students were also given the chance to look at the Group’s own quantum circuit under a microscope, a particularly magic sight for many of our crowd.
On Sunday morning, the fifth lecture of the weekend was given by Prof. Evelina Trutnevyte, head of the Renewable Energy Systems group at the University of Geneva. Her lecture “Computer models for the energy transition” offered an entirely different view on the general aspect of green energy. Instead of researching a particular source of electricity, her work allows to gain a holistic perspective on the infrastructure of the electric grid and energy sources needed to establish a renewable energy future. Which energy sources are currently used to cover how much of a share? What has to be done to achieve a working energy grid, covering the growing need for power and also the demand for low emissions? This lecture again allowed the students to think about how to implement science on a policy basis and what role the general public plays in the energy transition.
After some avid discussions, Dr. Duccio Testa, senior scientist at the Swiss Plasma Center, took centre stage and held the last lecture of the event. His talk picked up where Prof. Theiler stopped and presented techniques to actually heat a plasma to the required temperatures, including ohmic heating, laser heating and particle beam heating. Each of these techniques comes with its own set of problems and limits, giving rise to the task of finding an optimal distribution of heating mechanisms. He then continued by explaining the importance of the geometry of the magnetic field inside the reactor to allow for optimal containment and, at the same time, a high yield of fusion energy. It was also shown how a collaboration with Deep Mind gave rise to an AI able of adjusting the internal magnetic field in real-time to respond to leaking plasma or other issues. Dr. Testa closed his talk with a video, showcasing the jaw dropping magnitude of the ITER project in France.
Being the last lecture of the event, the subsequent intensive round of questions extended the length of the lecture to well above an hour, making for an adequate finish of the weekend. After three days with a total of six utterly fascinating lectures, it was then time to end the physical journey into the future of energy. During the duration of the weekend, the relevance of this topic became increasingly clear, not only from a scientific viewpoint, but also in the context of our everyday life. Each lecturer had a slightly different view of what the future will hold, but they all agreed in essence, namely on that a monumental shift on the landscape of energy is already happening, and that an even more monumental shift will be required to solve our energy crisis. What role nuclear, solar and fusion energy will play in this shift will be decided by the public, the market and, last but not least, scientists.
Overall, it was a fantastic experience to organise this event. The mix of the participating students allowed for a very social atmosphere, interesting conversations and a fun time. Additionally, we greatly appreciated the received feedback on what can be improved in the following years, especially since it was the first in-person event for all members of the YPF committee. While we could always count on the experience of retired committee members, it was still an entirely new challenge to put together such an event. Nevertheless, we are proud of what we could offer to our audience and are confident that the YPF 2022 was a worthy comeback to the in-person format after the online fora during the pandemic.
Credits & outlook
More information about the 2022 “Green Energy Physics” Forum (including abstracts as well as lecturers’ biographies) can be found on our website: https://www.young-physicists.ch/topic. We also thank all our lecturers for their time to prepare such excellent lectures and to travel to Zurich to hold their talks. Their dedication to their field of work truly left a strong impression on all participants.
The next Forum is planned to be held in April 2023. At this point, we would also like to express our thanks to Toni Berger, the President of this year’s committee, who will leave the YPF after the annual meeting in September. His guiding hand played a crucial role in the success of the 2022 forum. In this matter, we were also as lucky as to find three new members, namely from the Universities of Basel and Zurich as well as the EPFL, which will complement next year’s YPF committee.
This year event was made possible thanks to the collaboration of:
