Many-Body physics at and out-of equilibrium

Research activity of the group of Andrea Marini, at the Institute of Material Science of the National Research Council, Italy

SELDoM 2025

Napoli (Italy), 2025, 13-15 October

SELDoM 2025 (Surface and Electronic Properties of Low Dimensional Materials) is the workshop that will be held at the University of Naples Federico II  on October 13th-15th 2025.

The aim of the workshop is to provide a highly-specialized forum to discuss the surface, electronic and optical properties of low dimensional materials. The participants will report on a wide variety of scientific and technical developments achieved in the characterization and applications of low dimensional materials.

Main topics

  • Low-dimensional materials (2D, 1D and 0D)
  • Hybrid dimensional materials
  • Van der Waals heterostructures, twistronics
  • Quantum confinement effects in low-dimensional materials
  • Electronic and optical properties
  • Surfaces and interfaces
  • Band structure engineering in low-dimensional systems
  • Charge transport in low-dimensional materials.

The conference Program includes the following talk:

13 October 2025   15:45-16:00 A. Marini (invited speaker): Phonon Dressed Excitonic Insulator

2025 World’s Top 2% Scientists

As the previous editions, starting from 2020, also this year Elsevier has published the database of top-cited scientists that provides standardized information on citations, h-index, co-authorship adjusted hm-index, citations to papers in different authorship positions and a composite indicator (c-score).

Authors are classified into 22 scientific fields and 174 sub-fields according to the standard Science-Metrix classification. Field- and subfield-specific percentiles are also provided for all scientists with at least 5 papers. Career-long data are updated to end-of-2024 and single recent year data pertain to citations received during calendar year 2024. The selection is based on the top 100,000 scientists by c-score (with and without self-citations) or a percentile rank of 2% or above in the sub-field. This version (7) is based on the August 1, 2025 snapshot from Scopus, updated to end of citation year 2024.

The paper including the attached tables, published on the 19th September 2025 in the category “bibliometrics” (contributor: John P.A. Ioannidis, Stanford University), explains the calculation methodology, starting from the collected data and the selection of the indicators.

Physics education in Kenya leaps forward a century with APhRICA

Nairobi (Kenya), 2025, August

Teaching Quantum Physics using international methods has made its debut at MMUST Masinde Muliro University of Science and Technology of Kakamega (Kenya).

There, David Machiri and Wycliffe Isoe, from the Department of Physics of the MMUST, under the supervision of Dr. Victor Odari, senior lecturer and local coordinator of the APhRICA training program, in turn gave their Quantum Mechanics lectures to bachelor’s students.

Both of them had attended the first edition of the APhRICA QM1 (Quantum Mechanics 1) course taught by Dr Andrea Marini at the ICTP-EAIFR in Kigali in December 2024.

This is the achievement of an exceptional goal, which not only demonstrates the validity of the idea on which the entire APhRICA program is based, where scientific cooperation is the key to the transfer of knowledge to Africa on the legs of the best brains, triggering an intra-african domino effect.

In addition, it is also a potentially crucial innovation driver given the nature of the academic subject being introduced in the entire African Continent.

Quantum mechanics is the fundamental physical theory that describes the behavior of matter and of light and was led to the full development in the mid-1920s.

Since those years, all modern physics has been based on the QM theories, and today more than ever there can be no future and innovation ignoring those theoretical foundations.

Transferring this knowledge to African universities, where QM teaching is often inadequately taught, means making the academic world leap forward a century, filling the historical gap with a bridge connecting African graduates and researchers to the international scientific community.

In other words, from a cultural and scientific perspective the best practice today involving the MMUST is a key point of arrival and also departure for the further development of the Africa Continent.