HUN-REN-ELTE Theoretical Physics Research Group

There is an increasing international interest in systems with temporally changing dynamics. Tamás Tél, former head of the Research Group, together with Dániel Jánosi, physics MSc student, and György Károlyi, professor at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, showed that climate change like phenomena can exist in simple systems too, and their appropriate description requires the application of methods developed in the context of climate dynamics. The results have been published in Nonlinear Dynamics as an invited Feature Article.

An international inderdisciplinary working group led by two members of our research group has conducted unprecedented hybrid laboratory and numerical investigations tackling the problem of the permanent ice formation on Antarctica, which started 34 million years ago. The results were published in the open access journal Scientific Reports of the Nature portfolio. An English press release about the findings can be found here.

Tímea Haszpra received the Bárány Róbert award, launched by Eötvös Loránd Research Network for outstanding young researchers, for her project on atmospheric teleconnections: "The use of snapshot attractors for investigating the effects of climate change in ensemble based climate projections"

The 2021 Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded with one half to Giorgio Parisi, professor of the Sapienza University "for the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales". Earlier, Parisi has collaborated with Tamás Temesvári – senior member of our research group – on the theory of replica symmetry breaking in spin glass systems. Their joint research resulted in a two-authored paper, published in 2012. The other half of the prize was awarded "for the physical modeling of Earth's climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming" to Syukuro Manabe of the Princeton University, and Klaus Hasselmann, professor emeritus of the University of Hamburg and founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (Hamburg). Our group members involved in numerical climate modeling (Gábor Drótos, Mátyás Herein) have also worked together with researchers from the Hamburg "Hasselmann school" on problems related to the quantification of climate variability.

An interview with Tímea Haszpra was published on the web page of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA) in the series of "bolyaisok" about the research work performed during the János Bolyai Research Scholarship. In her project the effect of climate change on the global scale atmospheric pollutant spreading was investigated.

An interview with Tímea Haszpra titled as Predicting the Unpredictable was published in Élet és Tudomány 2021/23 to discuss the novel simulation methods used to study the effects of climate change on the polar atmospheric processes.

Based on the proposal submitted to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 2016, the new head of the group is the co-proposer, Sándor Katz, until the end of the term.

Two members of our group (Tímea Haszpra and Mátyás Herein) together with Dániel Topál (CSFK FGI) have shown that the Arctic Oscillation may change due to climate change, resulting more unpredictable wintertime weather. The research conducted significant media coverage. There were interviews on TV and radio in Hungarian. An English summary of the work can be found on the news page of Eötvös Loránd Research Network.

Tímea Haszpra received the MTA Bolyai Plaquette for outstanding research work during 2016–2019 in her project "The effect of climate change on the spreading of atmospheric pollutants – physical approach".

Two members of our group (Tímea Haszpra and Mátyás Herein) were invited by Clara Deser (NCAR, USA) to contribute an article to the 2020 summer edition of US CLIVAR Variations on Large “initial condition” Ensembles. Variations focuses on timely research questions and activities especially for the ocean and climate science community. In their paper our researchers promoted a novel ensemble based method (SEOF), developed at our group. SEOF is a very promising technique to compute ensemble based statistics for climate teleconnections.

Details and the original article can be found at the homepage of US CLIVAR.

The properties of the Arctic Oscillation (AO), which is important in forecasting winter weather, could change significantly as a result of global warming, which could pose new challenges for long-term forecasting, according to a recent study by two researchers in our group.

Tímea Haszpra and Mátyás Herein (Theoretical Physics Research Group of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences) and Dániel Topál, research assistant at the Institute for Geology and Geochemical Research of Research Centre for Astronomy and Earth Sciences, were the first who show that AO and its related phenomena, may undergo a significant change compared to its current structure and properties due to climate change.

Details and the original article can be found at the homepage of Journal of Climate.

The young researcher excellence programme of the National Research Development and Innovation Office (NRDI) granted funding to Mátyás Herein (as PI) and Miklós Vincze (as project member) for their project titled “Convective circulations in the Earth system under changing climate”.

For the proposal titled "Impact of the climate change on teleconnections between the Arctic and tropics" Mátyás Herein has been awarded the János Bolyai Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The researcher will investigate the influence of the ongoing and future climate change on the teleconnections between the Arctic and tropics.

Two former members of our Research Group, Zoltán Bajnok and Gábor Takács, have received the Academy Award of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences for their internationally recognised outstanding research in the area of low dimensional quantum field theories.

Miklós Vincze has been granted the visiting researcher fellowship of the Fulbright Commission of Hungary. Vincze can therefore spend three to six months at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Institute of the Florida State University (Tallahassee, FL), performing a laboratory experiment investigating the ocean current system of the Southern Ocean in the largest rotating experimental wavetank of the US. The expected grant start date is February 2021.

This year, our traditional Christmas Statistical Physics Seminar is held on December 27th, with a Program that can be seen here.

In the framework of the post-doctoral excellence grant programme of the National Research Development and Innovation Office (NKFIH) the proposal of Tímea Haszpra has been granted for the three years starting in December.

The Bolyai+ Higher Educational, Researcher Scholarship of the "New National Excellence Program" of the Ministry of Human Capacities has been awarded to Miklós Vincze. The accepted 10-month research grant bears the title of "Laboratory Modeling of tidal conversion in the ocean".

The article titled "Intricate features in the lifetime and deposition of atmospheric aerosol particles" by Tímea Haszpra was published in the July 2019 issue of the Chaos journal. It was chosen to be promoted as an "Editor's Pick/Featured" and one of its figures was selected to be the cover image for the July 2019 issue of Chaos.

An interview about the research was also published on the web page of the American Institute of Physics (AIP) Publishing. Besides the topic of the research it mentions as well the RePLaT-Chaos computer "game" which demonstrates the chaotic features of the atmospheric spreading of aerosol particles for high school students. Parts of the interview were published in other media, including but not limited to: Phys.org, EurekAlert!, Cosmos - The Science of Everysthing, Real Clear Science, Chemical Market News - Daily Source of Chemical Industry News, Agenparl - L'informazione independente, Long Room.

There is an increasing international interest in systems with temporally changing dynamics which might switch from a given behavior into a dramatically different one, as time passes. In relation to such tipping phenomena the head of the Research Group, together with Bálint Kaszás physics MSc student and Ulrike Feudel, professor at Oldenburg University, showed that these transitions should always be specified by the corresponding tipping probabilities. The results have been published in Scientific Reports.

Nowadays, more and more attention has been paid to major volcanic eruptions or even the spread of pollution caused by industrial accidents. The spread of the pollution endangers not only the local environment near the source, but also can reach and accumulate at distant regions of the Earth. Therefore, it is particularly important to understand their spread mechanism. At the same time, it is also a relevant question what is the role of the spread in a changing climate. These questions were addressed by two members of our group, Tímea Haszpra and Mátyás Herein. The results of their research have been published in the Scientific Reports. The summary of the research can be found in Hungarian language: www.elte.hu, which was also published by Origo.

This year, our traditional Christmas Statistical Physics Seminar is held on December 28th, with a Program that can be seen here.

Our collaborating researcher, Gábor Drótos, has been awarded the 2-year postdoctoral grant "Margalida Comas" of the government of the Balearic Islands in December. He will continue his investigations aiming at a more detailed theoretical understanding of oceanic and atmospheric transport processes at the Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Physics and Complex Systems (IFISC), attached to the University of the Balearic Islands, under the further supervision of Cristóbal López.

Professor Ferenc Niedermayer passed away on 12 August at the age of 73. Before accepting a call to the University of Bern, he had been a member of our research group for over two decades (between 1968 and 1990). His broad knowledge of several disciplines of physics was always there to be shared – in a friendly way – with his colleagues. Even after his departure in 1990 he kept an intense relation with members of our group. We bid farewell and will not forget him. Obituary in CERN Courier.

Tímea Haszpra ("Investigation of the climate change in an ensemble approach") and Miklós Vincze ("Experimental and numerical investigation of resonant gravity wave excitation in the ocean") have been awarded the Bolyai+ Higher Educational, Researcher Scholarship, and Bálint Kaszás (Physics MSc, "Investigation of physical systems with drifting parameters using low and high dimensional models") has been awarded the Higher Educational Master's Program Student Researcher Scholarship of the ÚNKP program of the Ministry of Human Capacities.

For his proposal titled "Laboratory-scale investigation of processes in environmental fluid mechanics and climate dynamics" Miklos Vincze has been awarded the János Bolyai Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The researcher will study oceanic internal wave dynamics and the climatic effects of the Drake passage opening using the minimal models of the von Kármán Laboratoory.

For her scientific activity in the investigation of pollutant dispersion in which she combines the theoretical (chaos theory) and practical (numerical modelling and ensemble simulations) aspects of numerical prognostics, Tímea Haszpra has been awarded the Dévényi Dezső Numerical Prognostic Commemorative Medal on the World Meteorological Day.

This year, our traditional Christmas Statistical Physics Seminar will be held on December 29th, with a Program that can be seen here.

Ten young researchers have been awarded the prestigeous Junior Prima prize at the headquarters of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Amongst them is Miklos Vincze who has received the prize in the category of "Earth sciences".

Our group organized, in collaboration with the Theoretical Physics Department of Wigner RCP and the Department of Atomic Physics at ELTE and with the financial support of the HAS, the 10th workshop of the "Austria-Croatia-Hungary Triangle" series, which was held this year at Zalakaros between September 20-22. The goal of the meeting is to present, with the intensive involvement of PhD students and young postdoctoral researchers, the new results obtained in particle physics with the application of non-perturbative quantum field theoretical methods. The talks can be found on the workshop’s homepage: http://hector.elte.hu/zalakaros17.

In the "Discovery Research Program" of the National Research Development and Innovation Office (NKFIH) two of our proposals were winners in the Young Reseacrcher category:

T. Haszrpa: Effect of climate change on dispersion processes in the atmopshere - a dynamical systems approach (F124256)
M.P. Vincze: Experimental investigation of large scale environmental flows and proceses of climate dynamics (F125024),

and one was selected in the Senior Researcher category:

T. Tél: Ensemble approach in climate dynamics and in nonequilibrium processes (K125171).

The post-doctoral excellence programme of the National Research Development and Innovation Office (NKFIH) funded the proposal of Mátyás Herein three years, starting in November.

Gábor Cynolter and Sándor Katz, the members of the group together with Csaba Csáki (Cornell University, USA) organized the 41st "The Johns Hopkins Workshop on Current Problems in Particle Theory" meeting between 2017 July 03 and 06 at the ELTE campus. This year the subtitle was "Beyond the Standard Model — Exploring the Frontier". The internationally well-known speakers arrived from all over the world, and beside the talks there were enough time for personal discussions. The list of participants, detailed program and the talks can be found on the webpage. The next, 42nd workshop will be organized in Florence in 2018.

Viktor Eisler has won a 45-month-fellowship of the Austrian FWF Research Fund (Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung). He will continue his research on the stationary states of far-from-equilibrium quantum systems and their characteristic correlations at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Graz.

As a recognition of his work in our Research Group over decades, Zoltán Rácz was awarded by the prestigious title ’Emeritus Researcher of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences’. The title was awarded by the Director of the Office for Research Groups Attached to Universities and Other Institutions, based on the recomendation by the President of the Academy.

In the re-election process of the bodies of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the 188th General Assembly elected Zoltán Rácz as the new president of the Physics Section of the Academy.

Members of our research group have authored two recent publications in the prestigious Nature Research journal ’Scientific Reports’. The two papers appeared online within a 3-day interval. Although the first is an experimental work and the second is a theoretical one, they both address the problem of appropriate statistical approach to climate change. Moreover, to the best of our knowledge, the experiments reported in the former paper are the first ever to properly model the relevant dynamical aspects of climate change in a laboratory-scale setup.

Based on a proposal submitted last year, the President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences extended the mission of our Research Group for the period between July 1, 2017 and June 30, 2022. In accordance with the proposal, the Group will be directed by Tamás Tél and Sándor Katz in the first and second part of this period, respectively.

Gábor Drótos has won a 1-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Physics and Complex Systems of the University of the Balearic Islands. He is going to study the dynamics of environmental flows and of particles advected by these flows. The fellowship is extendable by 1 additional year.

This year, our traditional Christmas Statistical Physics Seminar will be held on December 29th, with a Program that can be seen here.

Related to the research group's work concerning the application of the ensemble approach to the climate, Gábor Drótos has been invited for 3 months as a guest researcher to the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, where he can study one of nowadays' most advanced climate models.

In the framework of the post-doctoral excellence grant programme of the National Research Development and Innovation Office (NKFIH) the proposal of Tímea Haszpra has been granted for the three years starting in October.

For her proposal titled "The impact of climate change on the dispersion of atmospheric pollutants -- a physical approach" Tímea Haszpra has been awarded the János Bolyai Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The researcher will study the change in the characteristics of large-scale atmospheric dispersion processes in the context of a changing climate using a Lagrangian dispersion model.

Professor Károly Nagy passed away on 4 July at the age of 89. Nagy was a full member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and his many honours included the prestigious Széchenyi prize. He had been the head of our research group for over three decades (between 1968 and 1999), and he created the free and productive atmosphere that uniquely characterized our group even in harder times. After his retirement he kept following the development of the research group with caring thoughtfulness. We bid farewell and will not forget him.

For her scientific activity, in 2016 Tímea Haszpra has been awarded the early-stage meteorologist prize of the Hungarian Meteorological Society’s Zsigmond Róna Fund.

Mátyás Herein has been awarded a one-semester research scholarship of the Hamburg University's Center for Earth System Research and Sustainability. Under the supervision of professor Valerio Lucarini Herein will analyze a new statistical approach to climate dynamics. Details here.

Professor Tamás Tél, the head of our research group has received the Széchenyi prize for his achievements in the fields of non-equilibrium statistical physics, chaos theory, environmental fluid dynamics and its applications, as well as establishing a new school of thought in Hungarian physics teacher training and his active participation in academic affairs.

In the 10th call of the European High Performance Infrastructures in Turbulence (EuHIT) programme the research proposal "Wind-stress resonances and deep ocean energy transfer" co-authored by Miklós Vincze has been accepted. The EuHIT funding enables the researchers to conduct measurement campaigns using Europe's largest rotating tank for fluid dynamics experiments, the LEGI Coriolis Platform in Grenoble, France. Details here.

This year, our traditional Christmas Statistical Physics Seminar will be held on December 29th, with a Program that can be seen here.

Viktor Eisler has won a post-doctoral fellowship in the framework of the Lisa Meitner Programme of the Austrian Science Fund. Eisler will conduct research on the stationary states of far-from-equilibrium quantum systems and their characteristic correlations at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Graz. During his visiting research, he will be on temporary leave of absence from our research group.

In the 7th call of the European High Performance Infrastructures in Turbulence (EuHIT) programme, the proposal of Miklos Vincze titled "Extremes in a changing climate - a laboratory approach" has been granted. The EuHIT funds enable the researcher to conduct measurement campaigns at various well-equipped European experimental facilities of fluid dynamics research. Details here.

For his results in the refinement of weather forecast and climate prediction models, Miklós Vincze has been awarded the Young Scientists' Award for Environmental Protection of the HAS. Utilizing a relatively simple experimental set-up, Vincze conducted laboratory measurements based on which operational prediction algorithms could be tested and validated.

In the fourth call of the Distinguished Guest Scientist Fellowship Programme of the HAS, professor Ulrike Feudel of the Institute for Chemistry and Biology of the Marine Environment at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg has won a three-month visiting research fellowship to our research group. Feudel will be studying the transitions of dynamical systems with continuous parameter changes in Budapest, from July 22 to October 22, 2015. Her research aims to extend the classic theory of dynamical systems to those exhibiting arbitrary time-dependence, thus contributing to the prediction of unexpected changes in the climate system.

Zoltán Rácz research professor has received the Széchenyi prize for his internationally recognised outstanding research in the area of statistical description of far-from-equilibrium phenomena, and for his exceptional educational work.

Our traditional annual "Convivial Seminar on Statistical Physics" has been organized again.

Viktor Eisler (HAS-ELTE): Entanglement negativity far from equilibrium
Gábor Halász (Oxford U.): On the observation of topological disorder using a simplified entanglement measure
János Asbóth (HAS Wigner RC): Topologically protected states - from quantum Hall effect to quantum walks
Balázs Meszéne (Leiden U.): Field theory of quantum critical fermions
Tímea Haszpra (HAS-ELTE): Topological entropy - A Lagrangian measure of the free atmosphere
Miklos Vincze (HAS-ELTE and Brandenburg Technical U.): Self-sustaining pancake vortices and internal waves in stratified fluids
Tamás Bódai (Hamburg U.): On the predictability of heavy-tailed extremes
Gergely Ódor (MTI): The mapping of brain networks at MTI, and their modelling in Budapest
Miklós Rácz (UC Berkeley): From trees to seeds - On the inference of the seed from large random trees

For her research on drifting pollutants in the atmosphere Tímea Haszpra has been awarded the Young Scientists' Award for Environmental Protection of the HAS. Using a novel, self-developed approach, Haszpra analysed the spread of aerosol tracers with a special emphasis on the atmospheric propagation of ash particles from volcano eruptions.

In the framework of the Post-doctoral Fellowship Programme of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Miklós Vincze has received a two-year fellowship to our research group in the topic "Laboratory modelling of environmental and climate dynamical processes".

Mátyás Herein has won the Agocs prize of the William B. & Elizabeth Agocs Geophysical Research Fund (Lehigh Valley Community Foundation, USA) for his PhD thesis, entitled "Impact of the geometry and the endothermic phase transition on the thermal mantle convection".

Two members of our research group have been announced among the winners of the 2012 Momentum ('Lendület') Program of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Zoltán Bajnok will establish a new Momentum research team dedicated to "Holographic quantum field theory and gauge/gravity duality" at the HAS Wigner Research Centre for Physics, whereas the team of Gábor Takács focusing on "Statistical field theory of condensed matter" will be established at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics.