Head of Department Letter October 2024

Nobel Prize and research infrastructures

It is one year since Anne L'Hillier was awarded the Nobel Prize and we continue to celebrate. What impact does Anne's Nobel Prize have on us? This has come up many times over the past year. And another question has also been there: how do we get more Nobel Prizes?  But the latter is not the right question. The Nobel Prize is a consequence of a healthy and inspiring research environment and, as it would turn out, very successful recruitment. It is these conditions for our research that we must safeguard. This is how we can become leaders in our disciplines.

One effect of the Nobel Prize is increased visibility, not only for research in attosecond physics but also for physics as a subject and Lund University. It has also given rise to many discussions about what the elements of a good research environment are. For Anne and attosecond physics, it was the new laser that opened up new opportunities to conduct research at the department, together with the presence of the right colleagues and their drive. 

Today, an increasing number of our research teams rely on various research infrastructures for their research. Research infrastructures are advanced tools that are needed to carry out certain research. A research infrastructure can be a research facility, a laboratory or a unique piece of software. 

Being considered part of a research infrastructure rather than someone's lab has its advantages, but all of ours also face challenges. How to finance the boring but necessary costs of operation and maintenance? How do you do long-term workforce planning for a long-lived infrastructure when much of it is externally funded? How do you organise yourself if there are many users with different traditions of infrastructure use? What about students? And if you don't fit within the university, or maybe even abroad, how do you make sure you are still visible at local level? 

These issues have been raised during meetings with LTH in recent weeks. LTH is currently working on developing a strategy for the faculty's research infrastructures. This work is likely to inspire other faculties and Lund University. 

According to the University Library's LUCRIS manager, Lund University currently has 257 research infrastructures, of which 204 are classified as equipment. 30 of these research infrastructures are directly linked to the Department of Physics. The Department of Physics has six infrastructures of national interest according to the Swedish Research Council. However, there are also many other infrastructures that we use, such as MAXIV and LUNARC. 

The discussions with the other LTH prefects show that we often face the same type of challenges regarding our research infrastructures. These are issues of responsibility, flexibility and the link to recruitment, where we want someone with an independent profile but who is also involved in supporting our infrastructures, whether it is a laser or a computing cluster. 

The question we should be asking ourselves, one year after the Nobel Prize announcement, is how we can best look after and utilise our research infrastructures to produce more Nobel Prize-level research results, whether or not this leads to new prizes.  I hope that the discussions now and in the future can help us in that direction.

Else Lytken
Head of Department
Department of Physics