Annual Report 2012

The major event of our society in 2012 was once more the annual SPS meeting that took place from 21-22 June 2012 at the Hönggerberg campus of the ETHZ, jointly organized with the four National Centres of Competence in Research (NCCR) MaNEP, MUST, Nano and QSIT as well as with the Swiss Society for Crystallography. More than 550 persons attended the meeting. The scientific program was rather dense with 6 plenary talks, 237 talks distributed over 14 parallel sessions and 170 posters. Worth mentioning is the successful session of the new section "Earth, Atmosphere and Environmental Physics" and a dedicated session to celebrate the birth of crystallography in 1912 "100 Years of Diffraction". It was very satisfying to observe a large participation of young enthusiastic physicists sharing their research results and their experiences in a lively manner. The interest by the commercial exhibitors was once more well demonstrated by the attendance of 21 companies. As every year, the annual meeting was also the occasion to announce and present the winners of the SPS Awards in General Physics, Condensed Matter Physics and Applied Physics.

It became a tradition that SPS organises in collaboration with the Physikalische Gesellschaft Zürich PGZ a joint symposium every year. In September 2012, PGZ and SPS celebrated together the 125 years of PGZ with a meeting in Zürich on "General relativity and its applications".

Fostering its international relations, every other year the SPS organises its annual meeting together with the Austrian Physical Society ÖPG that will take place in Linz in 2013. The SPS maintained tight links to the European Physical Society EPS, participating in its Council and in various activities of its groups. In 2012 our society also welcomed its first international Associate Member with domicile in Switzerland, namely CERN.

In view of promoting young scientists, the SPS Young Physicist Forum YPF, that was created in 2010 and that regroups most of the Swiss physics student associations, has been accepted as a Commission of SPS in 2012. In the framework of this very active forum, the young physicists had organised a SPS sponsored visit to the International Laboratory for Particle Physics CERN at Geneva. As every year, our society also sponsored activities of the Swiss Young Physicists Tournament SYPT as well as of the Swiss Physics Olympiads SPhO, with two SPS prizes awarded to the best male and female finalists of SPhO.

Furthermore, our society also supported Swiss students for attending the 13th IONS (International OSA Network of Students) conference, that was jointly organized by PhD students from EPFL and ETH and that took place in Zürich and Lausanne from 9-12 Jan, 2013.

Three times per year the SPS publishes its "Communications", which is the most important SPS publication to disseminate information about on-going activities within the society and to review scientific progress in various areas. High-class articles have been published in the various, now well established rubrics. A paper copy is distributed to all members, whilst open access to this publication is also granted to the entire Swiss scientific community via the SPS homepage.

SPS is a member organization of the Swiss Academy of Science SCNAT and part of the platform Mathematics, Astronomy and Physics MAP. With two SPS representatives in the organising committee, our society is supporting the platform MAP actively in organising the "SCNAT-Jahreskongress 2013" on the occasion of the jubilee of "100 Jahre Bohr'sches Atommodell".

We are grateful to the organizational and financial support of SCNAT and acknowledge also support of the Swiss Academy of Engineering Science SATW. Thanks to a well-balanced program the Swiss Physical Society could once more close its budget with a positive balance for 2012.

Andreas Schopper, SPS President, May 2013