In the best ever performance by an Indian team, each of the five students representing the country bagged gold medals at the International Physics Olympiad (IPhO 2018) held in Lisbon, Portugal, last week. This is the first time in 21 years of participation that all five students have brought home gold. China is the only other country, among 86 others, to bag the maximum gold medals. Mumbai’s Bhaskar Gupta, Lay Jain from Kota, Rajkot’s Nishant Abhangi, Pawan Goyal from Jaipur and Siddharth Tiwary from Kolkata represented the country at the 49th IPhO this year. Of the 396 students who participated from across the world, 42 won gold medals after a gruelling two-stage competition.
Praveen Pathak, scientific officer at Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, a national centre of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), which led the international team, said India performed exceptionally well this year. “We have been participating in the competition since 1998 and this is the first year all the team members bagged gold medals. Thrice in the past, we have managed four golds and one silver,” said Pathak.
The team was accompanied by Pathak and KGM Nair from Chennai and two scientific observers - Surajit Chakrabarti and Manish Kapoor. While Jain and Goyal were among the top 10 rankers for JEE (Advanced) this year, Gupta and Tiwary, too, had good ranks. Three of the four students have opted for IIT-Bombay, while Jain is headed to MIT, US, to pursue a joint course in computer science and physics. Tiwary, who has opted for engineering physics at IIT-Bombay, is keen on pursuing research. Abhangi, the youngest, is in class XII and will be preparing for JEE (Advanced).
Speaking about the competition, Goyal said, “The experimental component was difficult, but the theoretical exam was easier and three of us scored between 29 and 30 out of 30 marks.”
Juhu resident, Bhaskar Gupta, a chess enthusiast, too, found the experimental component tougher. The theory exam had questions based on LIGO detection of gravitational waves, the ATLAS instrument at the Large Hadron Collider and the physics of blood flow in living tissues and growth of tumours. The experiments focussed on paper transistors and the phenomenon of viscoelasticity. Goyal and Jain bagged the seventh and 12th world ranks in the competition.
