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A delegation from the Institute of Physics together with partners from Poznań's UAM and Kraków's AGH took part in the Japanese-Polish Emerging Perspective Workshop at Tohoku University in Sendai on 3-4 October 2024. The primary purpose of the workshop was to further promote the bilateral strategic partnership between our research communities. The workshop and program was organized by the Tohoku Forum for Creativity unit of the University tasked with promoting internationalization and facilitating collaborative research. This year's Japanese-Polish workshop was organized with a focus on identifying emerging research directions for establishing a strategic partnership based on potential funding opportunities in the next several years.
Tohoku University is one of the top Research and Teaching universities in Japan, a member of the top three in many categories, and acknowledges as the most internationalized university in Japan. The university has among its graduates the Nobel Laureate for chemistry, Koichi Tanaka, and is associated with a great number of high technology and physical sciences discoveries such as carbon nanotubes, flash memory, spintronics, optical fibres, microchip CPUs, to name just a few.
The beginnings of the Institute's collaboration with Tohoku Univerity reach 1974, the highlights being the joint work of Hideo Ohno (Tohoku) and Tomasz Dietl (IFPAN) on magnetic semiconductors. The fruits of their collaboration included many highly cited works, e.g. a widely known publication in Science, and both researchers, together with David Awschalom, received the 2005 Agilent Europhysics Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Condensed Matter Physics for their “investigations of magnetic semiconductors and spin coherence in the solid state, which has paved the way for the emergence of spin electronics, or spintronics".
Our institutions have a formal cooperation agreement since the year 2000, which is regularly renewed, and we are looking forward to take it to the next level. The delegation included Piotr Deuar the Deputy Director of the Institute, Marta Chabowska, Katarzyna Gas, Sławomir Kret, Janusz Sadowski, Mircea Trif, and Andrzej Wawro from the Institute of Physics, Dariusz Kata from AGH and Anna Dyrdał from UAM. The delegation chair was Maciej Sawicki, the coordinator of the inter-institutional cooperation. The participants from Tohoku University included Shunsuke Fukami from AIMR (lead), Rie Umetsu (Institute for Materials Research-KinKen), Takashi Tsuboi (Tohoku Forum for Creativity), Adrian Graboś, and invited speakers Makoto Kohda, William Faguno, and Tomoko Ozawa.
The two day program included a combination of scientific talks, networking workshops and a live strategy panel. The Polish delegation also visited the materials research labs and clean room facilities at the RIEC institute. The overall goal of the workshop was to identify the main scientific interests of both communities that can be jointly pursued in the coming years on a broader level than before, as well as strategies to achieve this with the highest benefit for the academic community.
The scientific theme focused on quantum physics phenomena and devices with potential future applications - toward quantum computing. The range of topics included advanced materials manufacture and characterization, quantum simulations and topological materials, and more long-term technological and scientific goals. The potential for common training of young future researchers was on the agenda, as well as available avenues for this task. Thus not only aiming to bring together quantum physics pioneers from both the Polish and Japanese communities, but also allowing them to train young people ready to take over in the future.
The event proved very fruitful and the participants look forward to impending future developments. The plan has been outlined, and its implementation will depend on raising funds in the National Academic Exchange Agency's targeted strategic partnership program. Sympathizers of the scientific topic as well as those considering participation in an educational context are asked to keep their fingers crossed for the success of this initiative.