GUIDELINES for Best Student Paper Competition

Students who submit an abstract with an oral preference may opt to participate in the Best Student Paper competition. The competition itself will be conducted in two stages: (1) the student will first present a talk in a division technical session; and (2) the finalists will present their talks a second time in the final competition session on Thursday afternoon, June 1, 2017. Students who wish to be eligible for the CAP Best Student Paper oral competition MUST be prepared to stay for the entire congress and should take this into consideration when making their travel plans. Students who cannot attend the Thursday afternoon session are not eligible for the CAP competition and must notify the CAP office as soon as they are aware of this restriction. They can still compete in the applicable division or sponsored competition.

Eligibility, selection procedure, and selection criteria are as follows:

• the student must be a member of the CAP¹. If the student wants to participate in the division-level competition, if applicable, the student must be a member of that division one week before Congress starts;
• the student presenting the paper must be a registered participant at the Congress;
• the student must be an author of the presentation, must have made a major contribution to the research, must present it, and must take primary responsibility for its content;
• the student should officially enter the competition at the time of submission of the regular abstract – have selected the oral (Student, in competition) option;
• the student is NOT eligible to enter the Best Student Poster Competition.

Instructions and procedures for judging are as follows:

• the paper may be presented in English or French; the title and abstract should be in the language of presentation;
• by April 15, the student will be able to verify in the Indico system (https://indico.cern.ch/e/CAP2017) when, and in what session, the talk will be given (if accepted);
• finalists will be selected on the basis of marks assessed by judges appointed by the CAP division chairs in the appropriate subject area;
• As appropriate, the Program Committee will schedule the accepted abstracts into the oral program, either as a separate divisional student competition or as part of regular sessions. If schedule limitations do not allow for all oral competition entries to be programmed for oral presentation, the Program Committee may defer some oral competition submissions to the poster competition.
• The Chair of the Competition Committee will tally the results of the CAP divisional competitions and will post the names of the eight finalists for the CAP Best Student Oral Presentation Competition at the CAP congress desk near the registration area and on the CAP website by the end of the day Wednesday, June 15. All competing students are advised to check at the desk or on the website at that time. The finalists will receive tickets for the Thursday evening Recognition Reception at the Shaw Centre (see the policy statement below). The final competition will take place from 15h15 to 17h15 Thursday, June 1. The winners will be announced at the Recognition Reception.

Publication of winning results in Physics in Canada

• the top three winners of the final overall competition are expected to submit an extended summary of the paper (2-3 pages) to the CAP office – capmgr@uottawa.ca – by August 15, for the purpose of publication in Physics in Canada;
• the extended summaries submitted by the winners will be published in the Fall issue of Physics in Canada. The extended summary must have been specifically prepared for this competition (following PiC guidelines) and the student must be the main author. Reprints of previously published papers, or copies of papers submitted for publication elsewhere, are not acceptable as extended summaries for publication in Physics in Canada.

Policy statement on prize winner Recognition Reception tickets

Those students who have already purchased a ticket can either give the extra ticket to a friend or sell the extra ticket to a delegate on the waiting list (who have also been asked to be at the registration desk at that time to see if tickets are available for purchase). Since the reception tickets are pre-purchased by the CAP, should a winner not present themselves before 17h15 on June 1 to claim their ticket, it will be returned to the CAP’s inventory of tickets available for sale to delegates, with no compensation owed to the student.