Each country chooses a team of 8 best students, and they compete in two 5-hour rounds: theoretical and experimental. Last time, a physical Olympiad of such a high level was held in our country in 1979. One of the goals of the Olympiad is to tell the schoolchildren about modern science, its scope and interesting aspects, by means of tasks. For the experimental round of the Olympiad in 2017, for each participant we prepared a set of three samples of anodic aluminium oxide-based photonic crystals with unusual spectral properties. We also invented how to reproduce the exact laboratory experiments with simple equipment and make them intuitive and how to make evaluations using theory in order to avoid complex calculations. We made a spectrometer using a light bulb and a diffraction grating. Observing the rainbow through the sample and turning it, the students could see how the dark bands move along the spectrum. And for more precise measurements in different parts of the spectrum, the participants were offered to use laser pointers of three different colours. Alexey Noyan, Kirill Napolskii, Sergei Kushnir, Ilya Roslyakov, and Alexey Leontiev took part in developing the task and making the samples. If you want to see the constructed experimental setup offered to schoolchildren and try your hand at solving the Olympiad problems, in our laboratory you have such an opportunity!
The specifications of the tasks are available on the website of the APhO-2017 Olympiad: http://apho2017.mipt.ru/problems-and-solutions/
The article about the Olympiad in the newspaper "Troitsky variant" you can read here: https://trv-science.ru/2017/05/23/kak-olimpiady-mogut-dognat-nauku/