A Successful Pair of Conferences Held in Hybrid Mode in Difficult Times

The international conference on atomic collisions in solids (ICACS) and the international symposium on swift heavy ions in matter (SHIM) are long-running conference series in the general field of ion beam and nuclear radiation interactions with materials. While originally run as two separate conference series, ICACS being held biannually and SHIM every three years, after around 2010 it became evident that the meetings had much in common both in terms of participants and topics covered. Although not obvious from the name, the ICACS conference in particular had evolved toward dealing much with topics related to ion-induced electronic excitations in materials, which is also key to swift heavy ion effects on materials. Hence, the meetings started to be arranged jointly on some of the occasions. The previous meeting in the series was held jointly in 2018 in Caen, France. The collaborative spirit of joint and specialized sessions during the work of the conferences proved to be mutually beneficial for both communities, and the international committees of both conferences agreed to hold the next meeting in the summer of 2020 in Helsinki. Due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the meeting could naturally not be held in 2020. It was first postponed to 2021, and then, as the pandemic kept raging, again to 2022. While the omicron variant of the virus still caused serious restrictions to travel and meetings in early 2022, by around March 2022 the European Union countries, Finland included, had concluded that after a majority of the population was vaccinated, COVID-19 was no longer dangerous enough to justify severe restrictions on mobility and meetings. Hence, we could finally proceed with organizing the conference on-site in Helsinki, something the community had long missed. While preparing for the conference, we did, however, recognize that several regions in the world still had serious COVID-19-related travel restrictions in place. Most notably, the meetings have traditionally had large delegations from Japan, China, and Russia, all of which still had serious obstacles to travel in place while the meeting was being planned, and travel normally would have been booked from March to May. As it would have been detrimental to maintaining a truly international community in the fields practically to exclude these countries from attending the conference, it was decided to go for a hybrid format meeting, with a possibility to attend and participate in the discussion for all presentations over the Zoom videoconferencing software. We also organized a virtual poster session utilizing the Zoom breakout room feature. In practice, arranging the hybrid meeting was relatively easy, as the conference room had the necessary facilities for hybrid format presentations already. It was also free of direct costs, as the Zoom sessions were covered by the University of Helsinki secure Zoom license. The number of participants was about 90 onsite (Figure 1) and 80 online (Figure 2). The onsite program followed the usual format. The conference program comprised invited lectures as well as oral and poster presentations, with no parallel sessions. However, several invited and oral talks were given remotely, and these were spread in the program based on sciMeeting Report