The workshop on strongly-correlated electron systems, in the organization of the Centre for Solid State Physics and New Materials, dedicated to the work of Academician Zoran Popović, was held at the Institute of Physics, Belgrade, on 8-10 June 2022. A long-standing, distinguished researcher of the Institute of Physics, nowadays retired, Academician Popović is one of the pioneers of the solid state physics in our country, and the founder of the Centre for research in this field at the Institute of Physics.
The workshop dedicated to Academician Popović was organized by Nenad Lazarević, PhD, and this event brought together numerous speakers, guests from the country and abroad, who delivered and followed the lectures live and online. The director of the Institute, Aleksandar Bogojević, PhD, welcomed the audience at the opening, reminding them of Academician Popović’s contributions to the development of the Centre for Solid State Physics and New Materials, as well as the construction of the entire infrastructure of the institution. ‘A jubilee celebration is a good opportunity to organize a workshop and gather colleagues and friends to talk about the ongoing research’, said Dr Bogojević.
One of the participants of the workshop, Efthymios Liarokapis, PhD, of the Department of Physics at the National Technical University of Athens, believes that this workshop could become a tradition. ‘The most important thing for a conference is to attract renowned scholars, and I think that Academician Popović and other team members are acquainted with many of them’, says Dr Liarokapis, expressing his hope that he would continue cooperation with Academician Popović, having in mind that they use similar techniques in their research.
There were 22 lectures delivered at the two-day workshop, in which researchers presented their experimental results, as well as their various theoretical models. The participants were as follows: Dr Nenad Lazarević, Dr Rudi Hackl, Dr Efthymios Liarokapis, Dr Božidar Nikolić, Dr Borislav Vasić, Dr Rajdeep Adhikari, Dr Jelena Pešić, Dr Nenad Vukmirović, Dr Darko Tanasković, Dr Jelena Mitrić, Dr Čedomir Petrović, Dr Quingming Zhang, Dr Alberto Pomar, Dr Miloš Radonjić, Dr Snežana Lazić, Dr Jonas Beckert, Dr Valentin Ivanovski, Dr Bojana Visić, Dr Luka Pirker, Dr Marko Opačić, Dr Novica Paunović and Dr Emil Bozin.
‘The presentations of the Institute’s researchers impressed me and other participants and motivated us to continue our cooperation’, says Dr Rudi Hackl of the Institute of Solid State and Materials Physics – TU Dresden. He also highlighted that the cooperation with Academician Popović was very important, fruitful and productive to him and that the workshop promoted the visibility of the Institute of Physics, Belgrade, facilitating the exchange and dissemination of scientific results.
One of the organizers of the workshop, Dr Jelena Pešić of the Centre for Solid State Physics and New Materials reminded us of the range of Academician Popović’s influence on young researchers. The Centre he founded has opened possibilities for young researchers at the beginning of their careers, to carry out the thesis in their own country on topics which are current in other European and world research centres’, states Dr Pešić. She expressed her satisfaction that the StrainedFeSC project team, whose member she is, and which is funded within the PROMIS Programme of the Science Fund of the Republic of Serbia, had managed to organize workshops, bearing in mind that their activities were mainly scaled down due to the pandemic conditions.
Photo by: Bojan Džodan/IPB