The IPT continues to prove that it is an excellent opportunity for young researchers.

All problems in the International Physics Tournament (IPT) are open ended questions with no or little answer within the scientific community, provoking scientific thought and research process. This has allowed some teams with strong results and analysis of some of the IPT’s past problems to publish papers in some of Physics’ high impact journals.

The teams from École Polytechnique and ENS Paris this year successfully published their solution to the Popsicle-stick cobra, from IPT 2016, in Physical Review Letters. Furthermore, the article was selected for an article for APS’ Physics focus. Likewise the team from ENS Lyon managed to publish their solution to the same problem on the American Journal of Physics (AJP).

The accomplishment of these teams highlights not only the growth of the IPT and commitment from the teams, but also demonstrates that the IPT is a perfect opportunity for bidding scientists to gain research experience and even provides them with an opportunity to output publishable research! This article also joins another paper published last year by the participants of IPT 2015 in the European Journal of Physics. The full papers of the Popsicle-stick cobra solutions can be found here for ENS Paris/École Polytechnique and here for the ENS Lyon’s submission. Two videos describing the phenomena are shown below.

Credits: J.-P. Boucher et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. (2017)