Prof. Charles V. Sammut, Dean of the Faculty of Science and Head of Department of Physics, together with undergraduate and postgraduate students that took part in the Annual Physics Symposium.
This year’s Annual Physics Symposium was held on Wednesday 25 April in MP216, where undergraduate and postgraduate students presented their final year projects, short review papers, and Master's research projects.
Communicating their work as part of the Physics course provides students with the opportunity to acquire much needed communication and presentation skills that are essential in their future careers. The presentations covered a wide range of subjects spanning from the quantum field, to assessing the night sky to the interaction of electromagnetic fields with the human body.
The first series of presentations were given by six students following the B.Sc. programme with three projects focusing on the quantum field supervised by Dr André Xuereb and another two supervised by Prof. Kristian Zarb Adami and Dr Joseph Caruana, concerning research about space sciences and astronomy. Following a short break, four presentations where given by M.Sc. students. The first presentation by Karl Fiteni featured work on galaxy simulations to provide insight into the nature of the breaks in stellar density profiles. This project is supervised by Dr Joseph Caruana. The second presentation by Bernard Costa focused on research to develop and test new algorithms for improved performance in analysing huge data sets on particle collisions in the ALICE experiment at CERN. This project is supervised by Dr Louis Zammit Mangion who is also supervising Timothy Debono on a different project that aims to construct a modular vehicle dynamics simulator for UM Racing’s Formula Student racing car.
Daphne Anne Pollacco gave the last presentation in this session. Her project is supervised by Dr Lourdes Farrugia and concerns a study of dielectric properties of human tissues and the design of tissue mimicking liquids for application in the design and development of medical devices for microwave imaging and cancer treatment.
Following lunch, students had the opportunity to attend a talk given by representatives of TIPICO Co. Ltd concerning the relevance of various skills and knowledge acquired by physics, mathematics and statistics students in the online gaming industry.
The final session of the symposium consisted of five presentations concerning review papers by final year physics students.
The programme and abstract of the presentations are accessible by following this link.