School of XFEL and Synchrotron Radiation Users – SFEL 2022

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Jana Shepa  (ed.)

The book of abstracts from 8th International Conference on Novel Materials: Fundamentals and Applications, NFA 2023 is composed of contributions from the participants of this international conference. The conference consisted of 6 invited lecture and 38 abstracts of participants. The conference is focused on novel materials and its application in various research areas. All contributions are professionally processed and inspiring.

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Jozef Strečka

The present textbook deals with exactly solved models and their diverse applications in several branches of physics such as mathematical physics, statistical physics, condensed matter physics and so on. Exactly soluble models are currently considered as an inspiring research field in its own right, which regrettably requires a considerable knowledge of sophisticated mathematics. Accordingly, my primary ambition was to provide an intro- ductory course for undergraduate students that would cover the simplest exactly solved models, whose rigorous solutions are available even after modest calculation. The present textbook should be therefore regarded as an auxiliary graduate-level textbook, which should serve as the student’s guide on this beautiful but surely intricate subject.

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Ľubomír Šnajder - Ján Guniš

The publication lists interim results of qualitative educational research focused on the development and evaluation of programming tasks being carried out by authors since 2005 in the frame of programming competition PALMA junior.

The publication consists of three chapters: Computer science competitions in Slovakia, Tasks in computer science education, Selected problems of PALMA junior competition. The first chapter provides an overview of computer science competitions for a primary and secondary schools in Slovakia. The second chapter described the issue of learning tasks - their components, focus, formulation types, and development system of tasks. The third chapter contains the assignments and commented author solutions of selected problems represented focus of PALMA junior competition – programming, algorithms and mathematics.

For each problem is mentioned analysis of pupils’ solutions aimed to ways of thinking, typical misconceptions, sets of preparatory and extended problems. The publication is addressed to computer science teacher trainers, authors of programming competitions problems, and computer science teachers.  

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Marcel Uhrin - David Jandzik - Andrej Čerňanský - Michal Rindoš - Blanka Lehotská - Stanislav Danko - Ján Kautman - Peter Mikulíček - Peter Urban - Daniel Jablonski

Bibliographies provide basic scientific information, illustrate quality and intensity of research in a particular topic, area, or time, and thus help build a cultural-historical perspective of society’s appreciation of knowledge and education. Here we provide a bibliography of herpetological research in the region of Slovakia between the years 1791 and 2017. We collected 2,183 references authored by 1,453 different authors and covering all species of amphibians (18) and reptiles (13) occurring in Slovakia and, in addition, amphibian and reptile taxa occurring in 94 other countries.

Most of the contributions were published in popular magazines and non-indexed journals, while only about 12% of all references represent scientific articles from journals indexed in relevant scientific databases. The extensiveness of study on amphibians and reptiles has varied among different periods within the selected time frame. However, an obvious intensification in the field of herpetology can be observed, especially during the second half of the 20th century. While there have only been few professionals specialized in herpetology, an important role in promoting the research and conservation of amphibians and reptiles in Slovakia has been played by non-governmental organizations and hobbyists. The most frequent type of herpetological data in the referenced literature comes from faunistic research, followed by conservation and general information on herpetofauna, with the majority of published articles in indexed journals coming from the fields of palaeontology, phylogeography, and population genetics.

The presented bibliography is the first step towards building a solid base for future systematic herpetological research in the country and Central Europe.

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Peter Paľove-Balang

The text ‘Uptake and transport of mineral substances in plants’ in Slovak language provides a general overview of the uptake and distribution of substances in an easy-to-understand form.

The individual chapters introduce students to the properties of the soil environment, which have a significant influence on the availability of substances, as well as the transport of substances across membranes and over medium and long distances. The text contains the latest findings from the English literature, supplemented by diagrams and graphs created by the author on the basis of his own research or by compiling several sources.

The text is intended primarily for students of a master's degree in biology or ecology and assumes at least a basic knowledge of plant physiology.

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Marcel Uhrin - Petr Benda -  Peter Kaňuch

Bats represent a unique group of mammals, characterised by different life strategies. They are the only mammals capable of active flight, which, combined with their almost exclusively nocturnal activity, has led to the evolution of specific adaptations. One of the most striking is echolocation, which enables them to orientate themselves perfectly in their surroundings in the dark. Bats are mainly native to the tropics, but have also colonised areas outside the tropics, which, has led to a complex phenological cycle with active phases and interruptions during hibernation, especially in temperate zones. In this diverse and species-rich group (almost 1,500 known species), there is a wide range of social organisation as well as feeding and roosting strategies. The textbook "Fundamentals of Chiropterology" brings the current state of knowledge about these extraordinary animals in eleven chapters and two appendices for the first time in the Slovak language.

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Vladimír Zeleňák(ed.)

The proceedings contain abstracts of contributions from participants of the Student Scientific Conference of the Faculty of Science, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, which took place on April 22, 2015.

The Student Scientific Conference (SSC) enjoys long-term popularity among the faculty's students and teachers, and we are pleased that this was no different this year, with 128 contributions submitted to the SSC.

The contributions were organized into 19 sections, additionally complemented by an open programming competition and the final of the IHRA contest. For many students, presenting at the SSC is one of the first opportunities to gain experience in presenting their results before a professional audience. Considering the number of submitted contributions, along with the members of the expert juries from the faculty's teaching staff and the audience who came to support their classmates' presentations, the SSC is an event where a large part of the student and academic community of the faculty meets at one place and time. Many abstracts presented in this proceedings were developed as part of students' work on partial tasks that are components of research projects at the departments of the Faculty of Science, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University.

The abstracts represent, in a way, an overview of research topics at the individual workplaces of the faculty. The SSC proceedings thus serve as a useful tool that students and faculty teachers can use to present the faculty externally to partners, employers, and potential collaborators. Partners from practice have shown interest in cooperating in organizing the SSC for a long time. Since 2005, the association of IT companies has awarded a Prize for the Most Original Work and a Prize for the Work with the Best Prospects for Practical Application.

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Mária Ganajová - Jozef Hanč - Ivana Sotáková - Petra Letošníková (eds.)

The International Conference on Research in Didactics of the Science – DidSci+ 2022, continues in the educational legacy of the successful series of the previous DidSci conferences held from 2004 in Krakow, Prague, Brno, or Trnava. The DidSci+ conferences present a platform for enduring international cooperation, focusing on the frontiers and current challenges in science education research. This special edition of DidSci conferences, celebrating its 10th anniversary, was held in Košice, at the Faculty of Science of Pavol Jozef Šafárik University, from June 26 to 29, 2022. The careful double-blind review process has led to two major publications offering a comprehensive look at the latest advances in STEM and science subjects education. The first volume of selected papers is published as the IOP Conference Series proceedings, Vol. 3037 with open access at https://iopscience.iop.org/issue/1742-6596/3037/1, and is primarily devoted to STEM education, assessment, evaluation, feedback strategies, and teacher development. The second volume of selected papers, published by ŠafárikPress, focuses more on curriculum development, educational innovation, and digital technologies, primarily in chemistry and biology. Both publications are intended for a wide audience, including in-service and pre-service teachers of science subjects, university students in scientific disciplines, researchers in science education, professionals in pedagogical and methodological centers, curriculum developers, and textbook authors.

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 Ľubomír Panigaj - Peter Ľuptáčik 

(Náčrt systému a fylogenézy)

Učebný text je primárne určený pre študentov jednoodborového štúdia biológie a všeobecnej ekológie, ako aj odborom učiteľského štúdia v rôznych kombináciách s biológiou. Venuje sa v nich opisu jednotlivých skupín živočíchov, ich morfológiu a anatómiu ilustruje na obrazových materiáloch. K jednotlivým morfologickým a anatomickým štruktúram sa v texte nevyjadrujeme podrobnejšie, nakoľko text nadväzuje na predmet Porovnávacia morfológia živočíchov, kde na úrovni organológie boli tieto najvýznamnejšie štruktúry v rámci prednášok a cvičení detailne vysvetlené a opísané. Rozsah učebného textu nie je veľký, podávame v ňom základné minimum poznatkov, čo je podmienené jednak rozsahom predmetu, ktorý je len jednosemestrový, jednak tým, že ďalšie, špecializované predmety rozširujú spektrum poznatkov napr. na úrovni entomológie, hydrobiológie alebo pôdnej biológie. V zavere niektorých kapitol formulujeme niekoľko cvičných otázok, ktoré si študenti môžu na základe predchádzajúceho textu zodpovedať, s podobnými otázkami sa totiž môžu stretnúť na skúške alebo na štátniciach.

Autori

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Marek Bombara

The collection of exercises summarises and supplements the exercises realised at the Pavol Jozef Šafárik in Košice within the lecture course Elementary Particle Physics. The collection is intended for the master students of the Nuclear and Subnuclear Physics subject, but it could be beneficial also for other physics subjects or even for interdisciplinary study. 

The division of chapters roughly copies the order of lectures. At the beginning, students will briefly familiarize themselves with the basics of special relativity and its practical use in particle physics.

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Karel Saksl

Solving crystal structures is the royal discipline of X-ray crystallography. Its primary task, with the exception of defects, is to describe the atomic structure of the motif that, by its repetition, fills the volume of the entire crystal or crystalline phase. This task is nowadays more or less routine for single-crystal X-ray diffraction, which can locate hundreds to thousands of non-hydrogen atoms in large unit cells. However, in real practice, we often have material available only in powder form instead of single crystals. Solving the atomic structure from its X-ray diffraction data is non-trivial, mainly because the three-dimensional diffraction space of a single crystal is reduced to one dimension by measuring a large number of randomly oriented microcrystals (crystallites). Therefore, the solution itself requires, in addition to proper measurement methodology, the selection of suitable tools, procedures, and strategies that, through optimization, will lead to the solution and refinement of the given crystalline phase. The current limit of this method is approximately 100 non-hydrogen atoms in the asymmetric part of the unit cell, which, however, is sufficient for most inorganic materials.

The goal of these educational texts is to provide students in the second and third levels of university studies with specific guidance on solving crystal structures from powder X-ray diffraction data. These scripts build upon my first monograph and require practical knowledge of its content. Similar to my previous monograph, I offer solved examples without a deep theoretical introduction, demonstrating procedures and strategies leading to the correct solution of crystalline phases using the freely available GSAS-II program. The examples are arranged from simpler to more complex, and the reader will find many useful pieces of information in the literature references as well as in the comments below the line. Part of these scripts are data intended for your individual practice of the described procedures. 

Karel Sakls

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Adriana Zeleňáková

One of the fundamental characteristics of the magnetic state of ferromagnetic materials is the existence of a domain structure. The university textbook "MAGNETIC DOMAINS: SPECIAL PHYSICAL PRACTICE 1" is intended primarily for students of the Master's programme in Physics of Condensed Matter FKLm and for the PhD programme in Progressive Materials PMd within the profile subject Special Practice 1 at the Institute of Physical Sciences of the Faculty of Sciences of the Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice.  The textbook is divided into seven chapters. The first chapter is devoted to the basics of domain theory, including the history of domain observation and the specification of different types of energies in ferromagnetic body. The second chapter presents the relationship between domain structure and magnetisation processes in ferromagnetic materials The third chapter describes the different types of domain-wall interactions with the defect. The fourth chapter illustrates examples of domain structure in selected ferromagnetic body such as grain oriented and non-grain oriented electrical steels, amorphous and nanocrystalline ribbons. The fifth chapter summarises an overview of the different experimental methods used to visualise the domain structure and their advantages or disadvantages with respect to the structure of ferromagnetic materials. The last two chapters, the sixth and the seventh, are devoted to specific experimental tasks for observing the domain structure of a selected polycrystalline sample using the optical microscope Bitter powder method and the MFM (magnetic force microscopy) method. During the preparation of this undergraduate text, its individual parts were developed using the foreign language literature listed in the recommended references.

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Michal Goga-Marko S. Sabovljević-Martin Bačkor-Dajana Kecsey-Deepti Routray

A comprehensive guide that introduces you to the fascinating diversity and systematics of lower plants. These practical lessons are designed to provide hands-on training, allowing students to engage directly with the interesting study of Cryptogams by observation, analysis, and identification and experimentation. Beginning with the overall idea of cryptogam in a field trip near by the vicinity of Botanical garden then followed by the basics of microscopy in, will help to gain essential skills in understanding the components and proper usage of a microscope, a fundamental tool in botanical studies.

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Tomáš Samuely

Today, scanning probe microscopes are standard tools in materials science, physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering. Thousands of these microscopes are in operation worldwide and are at least as common and popular as scanning electron microscopes.

Despite the vast number of newer scanning probe microscopy techniques, classical STM remains a significant and irreplaceable method, widely used, for example, in solid-state research. In this text, we will focus on both traditional and innovative STM techniques that are available and utilized in the laboratories of the Center for Low Temperature Physics in Košice.

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Nataša Tomášková

Selected tasks and problems from biochemistry – metabolism follow biochemistry lectures on metabolism and individual metabolic pathways for students of the second and third year of the bachelor’s degree in the fields of chemistry, biology and their combinations with other fields. Scripts provide an opportunity to better understand the lectured subject matter of metabolism through the solution of tasks and problems as serve as a basis for one-hour exercises. The scripts are divided thematically into eleven chapters, and each chapter contains 10 tasks and 7 problems. At the beginning of the chapters there is a short description and explanation of the given metabolic pathway. However, when solving the tasks, the student must focus mainly on the curriculum that was presented on the given topic in the lecture. Subsequently, at the end of chapter, answers to problems are also presented. These scripts are intentionally accessible only in electronic form. The reason is the effort to continuously update and modernize individual tasks.

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Mária Ganajová-Ivana Sotáková-Petra Letošníková

The conference proceedings FORMATIVE 2025 – Implementing Formative Assessment in Schools Together constitute the output of an online conference organised by the Institute of Chemical Sciences, Faculty of Science, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, in cooperation with the National Institute of Education and Youth in Bratislava, within the framework of the KEGA project No. 001UPJŠ-4/2023. These proceedings present current knowledge, experience, and examples of good practice in implementing formative assessment in primary, secondary, and university teaching, with an emphasis on the use of digital tools. The papers address the foundations of formative assessment in the context of curricular changes and the ongoing educational reform, as well as specific didactic procedures for its implementation in the teaching of science and social science subjects, including mathematics, Slovak language, and foreign languages. Particular attention is paid to the development of professional teaching competences, formative assessment strategies, providing targeted feedback, and promoting students’ active participation in the assessment process. These proceedings also present the Digilib digital library, a tool developed to support the creation and management of formative assessment processes within the school environment. This publication is intended for experts in pedagogy and didactics, teachers at all levels of education, student teachers, digital coordinators, and all those interested in educational innovation and in improving the quality of teaching through formative assessment.

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