This year the 35th Dynamics Days Europe took place from September 6 to 10. Originally held in Twente, Netherlands in April 1980, Dynamics Days Europe this year was hosted by the Centre for Systems, Dynamics and Control at the University of Exeter, UK. The event gathered about 230 participants and began September 6 with a public lecture given by Prof. Mike Field (Imperial College & Rice University) entitled “Illuminating Chaos—Art (and Science) on Average.” The talk was intended for a general audience and it addressed the questions “What are chaos and the butterfly effect?”, “How do we know when they are present?” and “If they are present, what do we do with them?”. For the following days, from Monday to Thursday, the schedule maintained a good balance between plenary talks, mini-symposia, contributed sessions, and poster sessions.
Dynamics Days is diverse in terms of the subjects that are covered, such as active matter, physics of plasma, granular materials, networks, pattern formation, chaos, and stochastic processes, among others. This variety was reflected thought the entire conference and particularly in the plenary talks. For instance, on Tuesday, Marc Timme (MPI Göttingen) talked about collective nonlinear dynamics of power grids, a topic that is directly related to the ongoing switching of energy sources from fossil to renewable. Here, in a network-dynamics framework, he showed that concepts such as stability, prediction of critical links and non-local rerouting of flows are fundamental to designing, planning, operating, and controlling the collective power-grid dynamics. As another example, on Thursday, Michel Crucifix (Université Catholique de Louvain) discussed the slow dynamics of the climate system at time scales from one thousand to one million years. Specifically, the phenomenon of ice ages was discussed, and three different paradigms to deal with this, based on dynamical-systems theory, numerical simulations, and statistical inference, were presented. Six other plenary talks given by Sandra Chapman (University of Warwick), Barbara Niethammer (University of Bonn), Björn Hof (IST), Suzanne Fielding (Durham University), Alberto Pinto (University of Porto), and Blas Echebarria (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya) covered a range of additional topics.
Mini-symposia and contributed talks were distributed in sessions that ran simultaneously in four rooms of the Peter Chalk Centre. There were 24 mini-symposia and 16 sessions of contributed talks in total, so it was crucial for attendees to identify in advance which talks interested them the most. I had the pleasure of contributing a talk entitled “Superdiffusive transport and energy localization in disordered granular crystals.” I was also glad to meet with friends who did their graduate studies with me some time ago in Chile and who contributed as well to this year’s meeting: Nicolas Verschueren (University of Bristol), who talked about localised solutions in a non-conservative cell polarization model, and Uta Naether (ICMA, CSIC-Universidad de Zaragoza), who gave a talk entitled “Compact nonlinear localized modes in sawtooth lattices” and presented the poster “Stationary localization in Bose-Hubbard chains with gain and losses.”
Although the conference was intense in terms of the schedule, there was still plenty of time to socialize with colleagues and friends. Not only did the conference dinner help in this direction, there was also an excursion (that I sadly missed), and the weather behaved gently during the week, so that we could enjoy some really nice sunny days in Exeter.
Last but not least, the conference was very well organized overall, for which I would like to thank the local organizing committee composed of Christian Bick, Peter Ashwin, Jane Pratt, Ana Rodrigues, and Jan Sieber. Furthermore, as a graduate student, I would definitely encourage other graduate students to attend the next Dynamics Days meeting. It is a great experience and a good way to learn about what the community is working on. Personally, I am looking forward to attending Dynamics Days Europe 2016.
Alejandro J. Martínez