Dear bachelor and master students,

Organized by Physical Society of Hong Kong (PSHK), the Preliminary for PLANCKS2023 in Hong Kong will be held between March 25th and 26th, 2023 in online form. You may sign up in teams of 3-4 people, but all members have to be bachelor or master students (sorry, no PhD students). The deadline of registration for the Preliminary will be February 2nd, 2023.

The registration link is bit.ly/3IUQPxZ

If you have any questions, you may contact [email protected] . You may also learn more about the PLANCK competition from https://2021.plancks.org and https://www.iaps.info/events/plancks/plancks-2023-in-milan/

PLANCKS 2023 is organized by the Italian Association of Physics Students (AISF) and will take place from 12th to 16th of May 2023 in Milan.

The participants will be challenged with fascinating physics problems. Besides the competition, participants will enjoy high-level lectures, visit hi-tech laboratories and research centers and have fun socializing.

In order to allow all the participants to have enough time to travel, the OC decided to start with the check-in at 1 PM (UTC+2). For the same reasons all the activities will close at 1 PM on Tuesday. The event will be held at the Physics Department of the University of Milan, Celoria Street, 16.

As far as accommodation is concerned, the participants will be divided in two groups: one group of 200 people, composed mainly by the participants to the competition, will be hosted in Hotel Meininger Lambrate, in Monte Titano Square, Milano. The remaining 45 observers will be hosted in Hostelzzz, Giorgio Jan street, Milano. Both the locations are distant from the department more or less 20 minutes by foot.

The costs for the participants to the competition will be 320€ per team, while for the observers will be 100€ per observer. These costs, in addition to accommodation, include 3 dinners,2 lunches, 4 breakfasts, 5 coffee breaks and transport during the event.

At the moment, the program contains a free lunch and a free dinner. In this way the OC thinks that the participants will be able to enjoy the richness of Milan’s culinary offer.

In any case, it is good to note that the participants will not be left alone, but will be advised by the OC about the places with the best value for money. The OC will make a list with the best restaurants and pubs in Milan, area by area. For the participants over 30 years old, there will be a city tax to be paig equal to 2 € per night.

At the moment the Organizing Committee is still working on the social program but in the meantime the OC is happy to give you some more information about the event. On the first day, in addition to check-in, you will attend the opening ceremony and the first guest lecture. This will be followed by the first social dinner and the first evening of leisure.

The next day you will attend two guest lectures, the student session and some workshops of our sponsors. Afterwards there will be free dinner and an evening at the planetarium. The third day will be the day of the competition and after it we will give free rein to creativity with a nice trip around the city of Milan. A second social dinner will be held in the evening. The fourth day will be dedicated to visits to the workshops, another guest lecture and a poster session. Finally, on the last day the results of the competition will be shown and, after a last guest lecture, the winners will be awarded during the closing ceremony.

The organizing committee would like to point out that this schedule has yet to be confirmed.

The competition, fully in english, will last 4 hours and will be composed by 10 problems. As said before, the event is organized for 245 people and in particular THE OC opens the competition to 50 teams.

In the competition, each LC and each NC will have the opportunity to be represented by at least one team, winner of the preliminaries. Being that the number of LCs and NCs of iaps is 46, the remaining places will be occupied by other teams coming from the committees with the largest number of teams. If some LC or some NC does not make the preliminaries, then the PLANCKS OC will reserve the right to choose the team by drawing lots, using a random number generator. In order for the OC to implement the aforementioned decisions, each LC and each NC must communicate the total number of teams in their committee, competing in the preliminaries.Thus, every national committee has to inform the OC writing a mail containing these information to [email protected]