Waldemar Gorzkowski - Böcker

The International Physics Olympiad (IPhO) is an international competition on physics for high school students. The IPhO is organized in a different country every year. At present it involves about 35 countries. The proceedings consists of a short history of the International Physics Olympiads, the programme of the XX IPhO, the statutes, the syllabus, the texts of the problems and their detailed solutions.

This volume is the first international collection of the best physics problems (both theoretical and experimental) given at the national physics competitions for high school students in different countries. The book introduces the short history of the International Physics Olympiad, the Statutes, the Syllabus, the statistical data including complete list of winners and a collection of national reports. Each of the national report will contains — as a main part — the best theoretical and experimental problems (with complete solutions) given at the national competition or at the training of the team before the international competition. Taking into account that at present the International Physics Olympiad involves about 35 countries, we are sure that the book will be interesting for everybody involved with physics education not only with the physics olympiads.

The proceedings include both invited and selected contributed papers dealing with magnetic anisotropy and magnetostrictive phenomena. Investigated substances cover a broad spectrum of materials including single crystals with localized and itinerant moments, amorphous phases, magnetic films and multilayers. Various experimental techniques will be presented and discussed. Recent theoretical achievements were also presented.

This volume will focus on the theory and experiments leading to quantitative understanding of the magnetic field and temperature dependence of critical current densities in high-temperature superconductors. Topics will include: critical currents and flux-pinning, flux flow and flux creep, anisotropy of critical fields and currents, properties of the flux lattice and the irreversibility line, magnetization, granularity.