A recent meeting in the Black Sea resort town of Varna marked a warm reunion between two old friends: ICTP and Bulgaria's physics community.

Physics on the Black Sea

Much more renowned for its beautiful coastline on the Black Sea than for its elegant studies of black holes, Bulgaria is nonetheless a nation with a surprisingly strong tradition of excellence in theoretical physics.
Indeed the nation has enjoyed a special relationship with ICTP dating back to the Centre's earliest days. Two of the nation's most prominent physicists--M.D. Mateev, who later became minister of education, and T.D. Palev, with the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences--first visited ICTP in the mid 1960s, soon after the Centre had opened its doors. Since then, there has been a steady stream of Bulgarian scientists coming to ICTP despite Bulgaria's isolation from the global scientific community, first during the Cold War era and later during the post-communist period of the 1990s.
For all of these reasons, it was indeed fitting that ICTP's Office of External Activities (OEA) served as one of the 'travel' sponsors for the Fifth International Workshop of Lie Theory and Its Applications in Physics, held in the picturesque Black Sea resort town of Varna, between 16 and 22 June 2003.

The event was organised by the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Nuclear Research and Nuclear Energy. V.K. Dobrev, a prominent researcher with the Institute and frequent visitor to ICTP's High Energy Physics group, served as the lead organiser for the event, which was attended by about 60 scientists.
Lie groups, named after the famed Norwegian mathematician Marius Sophus Lie, are a distinct ubiquitous subset of groups arising in virtually all fields of mathematics and physics.
Groups themselves are fundamental tools of analysis for both physicists and mathematicians, helping to shed light on the endless symmetries inherent in nature that are present in something as delicate as a freshly fallen snowflake and as mysterious as a tightly wound multidimensional superstring.
When first discovered in the 1870s, Lie groups broadened our fundamental understanding of crystal structures and aided in the classification of particles. Today Lie groups play a critical role in studies of quantum groups, gauge field and noncommutative field theories, and supersymmetry. Such studies cross the boundaries between mathematics and physics. As a result, the workshop in Bulgaria served as an open forum where practitioners of both fields could meet to exchange their ideas and learn from one another.
Bulgarian science, including physics and mathematics, experienced a difficult period in the 1990s following the collapse of communism and the inevitable difficulties that arose from efforts to build a new society. Government funding, which had fuelled Bulgarian science during the Soviet era, was dramatically cut and the stability and respect that had been afforded the scientific community during the days of communist rule was lost to the whirlwind of change that took place throughout much of the decade.
Such cataclysmic change disrupted all facets of life, reaching into the most remote corners of academia and scientific research. Yet fears of a mass migration of Bulgarian scientists (including its well-trained community of theoretical physicists) to the West never materialised. Many researchers, despite the personal and professional deprivations that they faced (draconian pays cuts, a dramatic deterioration in working conditions, and a future that for years looked bleaker than the present), stayed the course, deciding that living in their home country was a more alluring alternative than moving abroad.
One of the reasons Bulgaria's researchers decided to remain was the 'open door policy' of ICTP, which enabled them to spend at least a portion of their time in Trieste where they could continue their research and interact with their colleagues. Indeed Bulgarian physicists visited ICTP during the 1990s no less than 530 times, as the Centre continued to play its long-standing role as a 'home away from home' for scientists in need.
Today the situation in Bulgaria is improving--both for its citizens and its scientists. In a sense, the Lie theory meeting was one of a series of events designed to formally announce that the Bulgarian science community has reentered the global scientific community after an extended period of absence--a time when one of the few welcoming pathways to science in the West was provided by an old and dear friend: ICTP.

Faheem Hussain
ICTP High Energy Physics Group

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