German Physicists' Tournament 2024
The German Physicists' Tournament 2024 is taking place in Hambourg, on Saturday February 10 and Sunday February 11. The event is held on the DESY campus, an important research center for physics.
The tournament act as the German qualification stage for the International Physicists' Tournament, held on April 2-6 2024 at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. The winning team will therefore be given the chance to compete further against around 20 other international teams, from all around the world.
If you have any questions, or would like some precision on any aspect of the competition, please either contact us by email or pass by our discord server for a direct informal chat.
Registration
If you are interested by the event, you can register on the registration page. There are two registration forms, one for teams, and for any other interested individual.
If you have a team, simply register your team with the corresponding form. We will come back to you closer to the tournament date to sort out practical issues (dietary requirements, arrival time, or special needs).
Please register as early as possible and no later than the 15th of December! You can always modify the registration later, but the earliest the easier it is for us to make sure our sponsors can cover catering and housing expenses for all participants.
If you do not have a team, but you are interested either as a participant, as a coach, as a jury member, or if you are just curious, you can use the "Interested Person" registration form. We will keep you inform of all news, and we will try to connect you with people with corresponding interest or needs.
Rules
Teams are composed of up to 6 bachelor or master students.
The teams compete in physics fights, were they get successively each of three roles (from the IPT presentation page)
- Reporter: The Reporter has 10 minutes to expose his solution to a problem. Then, he/she has to defend his answer and points of view during the following discussions.
- Opponent: The Opponent has to explain in 5 minutes the weaknesses and eventual errors of the Reporter's solution. The Opponent then participates to the discussion to improve the Reporter's solution.
- The Reviewer will review both the Reporter and the Opponent performances. His role is to help the jury decide their marks by pointing out the progresses made during the discussions.
After each round, each team is graded by a jury of physicists. The team with the greatest overall grade wins.
Each team is required to prepare a total of 3 plus the number of team members problems, from the official 2024 problem list. Therefore a team should be ready to be challenged on between 4 and 9 problems, for 1 person team and 6 people team, respectively. In addition, each team is granted a single permanent, and no tactical rejection.
Otherwise, the German qualification follow the official IPT rules. In particular, additional challenge rejections result in a cumulative 10% penalty on the total score.
Online preparation round
You may realize that there is a lot to digest before the tournament itself, and that can be intimidating. In order to smooth your experience, we invite all potential participants to an online preparation round on the 13th of January.
There you will get the chance to get familiar with the tournament format and get early feedback on your solutions and your strategy from experienced former participants and coaches. For the online round, we ask you to be ready to be challenged on 3 problems, regardless of the team size. Still you get one permanent rejection.
The online round is not mandatory, but the teams joining it will get one bonus point for each physics fight to which they contribute seriously, as judged by the online jury.
Practical information
All participants will be housed in the DESY guesthouse, directly on campus. The competition itself will start Saturday morning, but participants are encouraged to arrive on Friday evening already. Organizers will welcome you at DESY main gate (Notkestrasse 85, 22607 Hamburg) regardless of your arrival time.
A tentative time plan is available under the timetable section on the side.
Sponsors
We thank the Hamburg Center for Ultrafast Imaging (CUI) and DESY for their support !
