Indonesia hosts international physics competition

Yogyakarta, Indonesia, welcomed nearly 400 high school students from 86 countries participating in this year’s International Physics Olympiad from 16–24 July. Akihiro Watanabe of Japan was awarded the highest overall score and did best on the experimental part of the competition. The top performer on the theoretical exam was Haoyang Gao of China. Those were the results that were announced in a live-streamed awards ceremony.

However, students from some countries received an incorrect translation or version of the exam, says Paul Stanley, the US team’s academic leader. Because of that, he says, scoring was done differently this year, and the awarding of those three top prizes may yet be disputed by some national teams.

All of the US team’s five members took home medals, which are awarded on the basis of total individual scores. Gold medals went to Shreyas Balaji of Sugar Land, Texas; Jimmy Qin of Lake Mary, Florida; and Kye Shi of Newark, California. Sanjay Raman of Redmond, Washington, and Michelle Song of Fremont, California, both won silver. The US team is sponsored jointly by the American Association of Physics Teachers and the American Institute of Physics, with additional support from AIP’s other member societies. (Physics Today is published by AIP.)

The US team finished eighth by combined medal count, after countries whose team members won all golds (China, Russia, Singapore, and South Korea) and four golds and a silver (India, Romania, and Vietnam). This year, 64 competitors won gold medals, 72 received silver, and 102 took home bronze.

In the experimental part of the exam, students were asked to use a laser to investigate the diffusion of a salt solution in distilled water. They also levitated graphite pencil leads to create and characterize a magnetic camelback potential and then explored how the approach could be used for seismic sensing and volcanic monitoring.

Students tackled three theoretical questions. One involved dark matter, galactic clusters, and interstellar gas. Another required calculations related to the physics behind volcanoes, earthquakes, and tsunamis. The third dealt with cosmic inflation.

The competitors found the diffusion lab to be “numerically intensive,” the camelback potential to require “careful attention to balance,” and the theory questions “very daunting,” says Stanley, who is a physics professor at Beloit College in Wisconsin.

The exams took place over two days. The rest of the time, students explored the area and got to know their peers from around the globe. Highlights included visits to an 18th-century palace and the 9th-century Borobudur Temple, one of the world’s greatest Buddhist monuments. The students also got to try their hands at batik-making, a method of dyeing cloth using wax to create patterns; planting rice in a paddy; and playing the anklung, a traditional musical instrument of Indonesia.

Before the Olympiad, the US competitors spent a week in Bangkok, preparing jointly with the team from Thailand.

Next year’s Olympiad will be held in Lisbon, Portugal.