The third annual PhD student meeting of the ENB PhD program “Topological Insulators” took place in Pilsen, Czech Republic, from 25.9.-29.9.2017. Our group was composed of 16 PhD students from the University of Würzburg, 5 PhD students of the University Regensburg and 3 PhD students from the research center Jülich. Each student had the opportunity to give either a 20 minutes talk (+ 10 minutes discussion) or to present a poster on his/her current research. To stimulate further discussions between students, each speaker was asked to be available after his/her session to answer further questions and explain more details on the provided flip charts.

We also had the pleasure to listen to talks and to learn from two invited speakers: Attila Geresdi from Delft University and Subhro Bhattacharjee from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in India. Attila Geresdi is an experimental physicist and expert on Majorana wires and topological quantum computing. He gave an introduction on Majorana particles and braiding statistics. Furthermore he talked about the current state of the art on topological quantum computing. Subhro Bhattacharjee is a theoretical physicist and an expert on strongly correlated systems. He gave a talk on quantum spin liquids and the toric code model.

Aside from the scientific program, students had the opportunity to take part in a soft-skill seminar „Time-management in academia“ by Sanja Stevic from the Golin scientific consultant company. The meeting was rounded up by a conference dinner, an underground tour in Pilsen as well as a city tour organized by the local tourist office.