PLANCKS 2017—Physics League Across Numerous Countries for Kick-Ass Students

PLANCKS is a theoretical team competition from physics students for physics students all around the world. It originates from the local version in the Netherlands, where it took place for the first time in 2014, and since then has spread through Europe, promoted by the International Association of Physics Students (IAPS). During national preliminaries teams had the opportunity to qualify for the final contest, which took place in 2017 in Graz, Austria. The entire organisation of this international competition is carried out by physics students on an honorary basis.

in which the best two or three teams qualify for the final round. Already these national competitions attract quite a lot of teams, as in Germany, where there are more than 20 participating teams in the so-called DOPPLERS preliminary PLANCKS round.
The venue of the final round alters every year and is determined by competitive application at the general assembly of the IAPS. Currently, whilst the approximately 10 preliminaries have a quite individual format, the finals follow a similar scheme. These take place in May or June, last for three to four days and start with an opening ceremony with highly qualified keynote speakers on the day of arrival. One day is usually dedicated to the competition and some cultural activities, whereas on the last day the results are announced and the winning teams are awarded.
The aim of PLANCKS is to bring young physicists together and to encourage scientific discussion amongst them. It acts as a possibility for getting to know other physics students from all over the world.

PLANCKS problems and competition
A typical PLANCKS challenge consists of 10 challenging theoretical problems from all areas of physics, such as astrophysics, electrodynamics, particle physics, special and general relativity, theoretical and quantum mechanics, statistical physics, thermodynamics, solid state physics, fusion physics, and so on.
The challenge is to solve those problems in a team without any tools like books or the help of a computing device. The usual working time for the final competition is four hours.
The set-up for the preliminaries may vary: in many cases fewer problems have to be treated in less time. Since the creation of sophisticated problems is not an easy task, national committees share their problems and have their preliminary competition on the same day, in so-called joint preliminaries.
The solutions of the teams are corrected immediately afterwards by PhD students or postdocs according to a correction scheme provided by the designers of the problems, who are usually professors from the respective universities.

PLANCKS 2017
One hundred and forty-four students from 19 countries qualified for and participated in the finals of the PLANCKS 2017 competition, which took place from 25 May to 29 May in Graz, Austria. With the competition attracting more and more students each year, there was a record 36 participating teams, mostly from European countries, in its fourth edition. Figure 1 shows a group picture of all participants and organizers just before the competition. The by far longest journey was made by the team NTU Singapore, which won a travel fund to compensate for their high travel expenses-the biggest hurdle for potential American and Asian teams to participate.
The finals were organized by many volunteers, local physics students with the financial support of the local student unions, universities, and the European Physical Society (EPS); participation fees covered board, local transport and lodging. The total budget amounted to approximately 35,000€. The opening ceremony of the finals of PLANCKS 2017 started with three interesting talks, about the Higgs boson (Victoria Martin, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom), gravitational waves (Reinhard Prix, Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, Germany) and magnetic skyrmions (Karin Everschor-Sitte, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany).
The four-hour competition on the next day was followed by a scientific discussion where the students had the chance to discuss their solutions with the professors who designed the problems. Interesting discourse then transformed into a barbecue party with a local live band, 'The Phy-sicks'. On the third day, after breakfast, the winners were announced and certified. Team Aplanckados from Spain reached first place and was rewarded a prize money of  » · 2 10 € 2, 109.14 37 1 Js €. The scores of the best five teams are listed in table 1; the total results can be found online [5].
Afterwards the teams could explore Graz on an organised city tour and challenge their physical trivial knowledge in a pub quiz. The optional fourth day started with lab tours of the physics facilities at both universities in Graz and continued with a trip to the famous chocolate factory in South Styria, including a visit to a nice restaurant in the countryside.
The problems of the final PLANCKS competition 2017 are listed in table 2 and can be found online [2]. The distribution of reached points is visualized in figure 2 in a boxplot  including the median (red line), first and third quartile (lower and upper bound of the box) and The system is prepared at t=0 in a state consisting of all spins oriented in the x direction. At the same time a magnetic field, described by the Hamiltonian  where the expectation value in equation (4) is carried out with respect to the ground state of H+H B .
(7, 2 point) Consider now Δ J>0 and a magnetic field applied to the first spin only, described by the Hamiltonian