20th Annual Student Conference
Week of Doctoral Students 2011 May 31–June 3, 2011
Charles University in Prague Faculty of Mathematics and Physics Troja, Prague 8

Charles University

The oldest university in central Europe, Charles University was founded on April 7, 1348 by Charles IV, later the Holy Roman Emperor and the King of Bohemia. From its foundation it was devoted to studia generalia and it was endowed by the emperor with all the privileges enjoyed by older European universities. The university still bears his name and still strives to fulfil the vocation, which its founder so wisely intended for it: to be a place which opens the way to education, wisdom, and knowledge. Since its foundation, however, Charles University has also been an international institution, welcoming in its lecture halls students and distinguished academics from all over the world, contributing to creation of European and world science and becoming mother or sister to many other European universities in neighbouring areas.

At present, Charles University consists of seventeen faculties and educates more than 30,000 students a year. The faculties are centres not only for teaching, but also for research and scholarship.

Faculty of Mathematics and Physics

The Faculty of Mathematics and Physics is one of the seventeen faculties of Charles University. Mathematics, physics, and astronomy which today belong among the exact or natural sciences, were lectured at the university almost from the very beginning. Among the scholars who have worked at and/or cooperated with Charles University and its faculties while staying in Prague were Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, Bernard Bolzano, Ernst Mach, Albert Einstein, Rudolf Carnap and Jaroslav Heyrovský. Mathematics and physics were traditionally taught within the frame of the Philosophical Faculty (Faculty of Arts) until 1920 when the independent Faculty of Natural Sciences came into existence. Nowadays, it is the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics established in 1952, which provides education in all fields of computer science (informatics), mathematics, physics in BSc, MSc and PhD courses, and offers training for those that intend to graduate as school teachers of these subjects. A characteristic feature of the Faculty is the close interconnection of teaching activities and a wide spectrum of research work.

At this Faculty, students benefit from being taught by those at the forefront of scholarship and research in their fields. A part of the research has an applied aspect (in 2008, for example, there have been 456 major projects undertaken with significant importance for industry and research institutions). At present, teaching is provided by 372 teachers (including 62 full- and 106 associate professors) in thirty departments and Faculty Institutes (representing three sections: the School of Computer Science, the School of Mathematics and the School of Physics). The scientific reputation of the Faculty is reflected in the high success rate of domestic and international grant proposals: in 2009 scientists of the Faculty have participated in 316 projects of Czech grant agencies and 19 international projects. The same year the staff of the Faculty published 21 monographs, 10 textbooks and 1194 papers, 952 of which are original works. Together with research workers from the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, the committed staff of the Faculty supervised 760 postgraduate students in 29 fields of study and 81 PhD theses were successfully defended.

Week of Doctoral Students

The Faculty organizes an international student conference every year as a part of the education of postgraduate students. In order to give the students an opportunity to prepare for their future participation in international conferences, the structure and regime of the WDS resemble strongly such a conference: near branches of study are grouped into symposia, and particular sessions of symposia are lead by experienced chair, time-schedule for contributions is firm, language of the conference is English and the written contributions are published in reviewed Proceedings.

WDS WELCOMES BOTH ACTIVE AND VISITING PARTICIPANTS

WDS conferences are open: besides students enrolled at the Faculty, the staff of the Faculty and co-operating academic institutions, students, and experts of other Czech and foreign universities have always taken part. These latter participants come from universities with research activities in fields similar to the study branches of the doctoral education at the Faculty and with some degree of co-operation with our departments. Their active presence allows the students, the supervisors, and the members of the Doctoral Study Branch Committees to make an objective evaluation of the results of their own work.

Staff members of the Faculty, of the institutes of the Academy of Sciences, and of other co-operating institutions are cordially invited to come. WDS offers them a rare opportunity to get fresh information about the today's research activities of the departments of the Faculty and of other co-operating institutions.

In course of the years, the number of participants increased and a saturated level of about 200 contributions (both oral and poster) was reached at the end of the last century. A short survey of this evolution is presented in following diagrams together with evolution of published papers in the WDS Proceedings.

Notes to the registration process

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1. The conference is free-of-charge.
2. Students from Faculty of Mathematics and Physics specify so at the beginning of the registration form.
3. Students from other Universities indicate if they would like to apply:
   • To book the accommodation during the conference (free of charge or not).
   • To receive the support on living expenses (450 CZK per day).
   • To obtain the official invitation for the visa application.
     In these cases, each student after registration may fill in the corresponding form(s). Foreign participants that apply for Visa need to be registered before April 25. After this date, we cannot handle individual applications because the official invitations will be sent to Czech consulates in one stack on April 26, 2011. Each applicant will receive her/his copy of the invitation that should be enclosed to the application for Visa.

We regret but we can grant accommodation and financial support only to 35 participants.

Click here for a "List of already registered participants".

Click for list of accommodated persons with designation to one of the hostels.

Interactive registration forms

• CLOSED – registration and abstract submission form
• CLOSED – request for invitation letter
• CLOSED – booking of accommodation, request for accommodation and/or financial supports

Plenary lectures

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We are planning several plenary lectures interesting for all participants (a list of the general lectures presented in previous years).

Jiří Svoboda:
Looking into the Inner Black Hole Accretion Disc with Relativistic Models of Iron Line
(Annual Award of the B. Bolzano Foundation in Physics, 2010)

Abstract.   My research deals with astrophysical black holes, including stellar-mass black holes in Galactic binaries and super-massive black hole in nuclei of active galaxies. I will present our recent results in studying various effects on the spin measurements via relativistically smeared X-ray emission lines. For instance, precision of the spectra fitting procedure could be compromised by inappropriate accounting for the angular distribution of the disc emission. Particularly, a limb-darkening law has been frequently assumed in reflection models although some radiation transfer computations exhibit an emission excess towards grazing angles (limb brightening). I will show that an improper usage of limb darkening can lead to an over-estimation of the spin value and can partly mimic a steeper profile of the radial emissivity. I will demonstrate these results on the case of the XMM-Newton observation of the Seyfert galaxy MCG-6-30-15, and on the simulated data for the next-generation X-ray missions. An unknown geometry of the disc corona is another issue which will be discussed. Fully relativistic self-consistent models with lamp-post scheme (in addition to an isotropically distributed corona) have been currently developing in our group. Application of these models on high-quality X-ray data is among my future research interests.

The invited lectures and oral contributions will be divided into the symposia in accordance with their topics. The number of the symposia depends on the number of the contributions and will be determined in course of the programme preparation.

The applicants outside of the Faculty are asked to indicate the code of the study branch which is relevant to the topic of their contributions.

Types of contributions

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• Oral contributions of doctoral students finishing their first year of study. In 20 minutes, students report on the state-of-art in their research branches (as they understand it after a year studying the literature) and on their own research plans and, maybe, their first results.
• Posters (connected with 5 minute oral presentation) or oral presentations (20 minutes) of older students which show their own original scientific results.
  Dimensions of poster boards are: 150x100 cm (portrait).
• Invited lectures of professors (40 minutes long) bringing broad and deep surveys about the research in fields related to the particular study branches.

Information for speakers

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Oral session meeting halls T1 and T2 and small presentation rooms T7, T8, and T9 are equipped with overhead projectors and computers with data projectors (Windows XP, standard sw: IE / MS Office-PowerPoint / Adobe Acrobat Reader / GhostView, other sw: ask WDS 2011 Organizing Committee, media: USB-stick / CD-ROM / LAN). Speakers must load and check their presentations before their particular half-day session starts.

Proceedings

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The Faculty plans to issue the Proceedings of contributed and invited papers. You can visit www pages with contents of proceedings of WDS'95, WDS'96, WDS'97, WDS'98, WDS'99, WDS'00, WDS'01, WDS'02, WDS'03, WDS'04, WDS'05, WDS'06, WDS'07, WDS'08, WDS'09, and WDS'10.

Suggested reference examples:

Novak A., Squares and triangles, in WDS'08 Proceedings of Contributed Papers: Part I - Mathematics and Computer Sciences (eds. J. Safrankova and J. Pavlu), Prague, Matfyzpress, pp. 134-137, 2008.
Novak B. et al., Ions and molecules, in WDS'08 Proceedings of Contributed Papers: Part II - Physics of Plasmas and Ionized Media (eds. J. Safrankova and J. Pavlu), Prague, Matfyzpress, pp. 334-337, 2008.
Novak C. and Novotny D., Electrons in Matter, in WDS'08 Proceedings of Contributed Papers: Part III - Physics (eds. J. Safrankova and J. Pavlu), Prague, Matfyzpress, pp. 634-637, 2008.

If you wish to publish your contribution in the book of Proceedings of WDS 2011, you are asked to answer the corresponding question in the registration form:

• I suppose to publish my contribution in the WDS proceedings (yes/no).

The contributions will be collected electronically (TEX+PS(PDF) or DOC files) via FTP and should be submitted not later than June 11. You will receive the address of your FTP box for submission after the registration deadline.

Student's contributions can be published only under the agreement of the supervisor. Your supervisor will receive the corresponding form via the e-mail address that you have provided in your application.

All manuscripts will be reviewed by one specialist and one doctoral student appointed by the student's supervisor (she/he would fill up the "supervisor agreement form" received by e-mail) and/or by the particular session chairman/referee (taking into account the supervisor recommendation) immediately after the WDS week.

We will return comments, requests, and/or suggestions of reviewers to the authors during July/August. Then the authors should return the final version of their papers (together with the Letter to the referees reflecting your changes and complements). Finally, we can arrange the distribution of the Proceedings quickly (expected at October/November). We use electronic delivery via FTP only (the same instructions apply as for the starting version paper), in order to make necessary format corrections easy.

The rules for referees you can find here.

The electronic manuscript of contributions to be published in the Proceedings are expected to be prepared in LaT_EX or MS Word. There is an option to set the basic font size of the printed article to 11 or 10 pt.

• The authors wishing to prepare their articles in LaT_EX are requested to use the prepared LaT_EX style wds11.sty (wds10.sty - 10pt version) together with the agu11.sty (agu10.sty, resp.) include file (all of them are written for LaT_EX 2.09 and can be therefore used in LaT_EX_2e compatibility mode, too). Authors can also download the sample LaT_EX file (and figures neccessary for compilation):
  LaT_EX sample files

  			GZipped
  Sample file (LaTEX2e .. e.g. MikTeX)	wds2e_ex.tex	16 kB	6 kB
  Sample file (LaTEX2e for those using BibTeX - requires natbib package)	wds2e_exbib.tex	16 kB
  	egs.bst (suggested bibliography style)	37 kB
  Sample file (older LaTEX 2.09 )	wds209ex.tex	16 kB	6 kB
  Figures	gim70131.ps	101 kB	15 kB
  	dvepara2.eps	88 kB	14 kB
  	iii.ps	93 kB	30 kB
  Sample PS output	wds20ex1.ps	393 kB	114 kB

• The authors preferring MS WORD 2000 are requested to use the template wds2000e11.dot (wds2000e10.dot - 10pt version). They can also download the example MS Word document prepared using this template wds20e11.doc (wds20e10.doc - 10pt version) (430kB) or compressed wds20e11.doc.gz (wds20e10.doc.gz, resp.) (40kB).

Both examples include the required font settings, formatting of title, authors, affilations, abstract, references, and page headings, as well as suggested article sections. Black&white figures and caption examples are also included. All questions regarding the above style and templates should be addressed to lubomir.prech at mff.cuni.cz.

Language of Publication: English

Maximum Length of Manuscripts

Invited paper	10 pages - A4 format
Contributed paper (students)	4-6 pages - A4 format

The conference will start with a general plenary session for all participants. This lecture provides an outstanding opportunity for students and teachers to review the latest issues affecting the physics, mathematics, and computer sciences. The daily programme will be divided into symposia according to study branches. The symposia will continue, with breaks for coffee or lunch, till 6 p.m.

The poster sessions will be held after the corresponding symposium. All contributors are asked to arrange their posters before the morning session to give the possibility to other participants to see them during breaks and to remove the posters after their sessions.

The Faculty can offer a limited number of the accommodation facilities in the student campus. An applicant will share a two-bed room with another WDS participant.

Accommodation of active participants is free of charge, however, the number of supports is limited to 40.