FID Physics – a Specialised Information Service for Physics

• Applicants: Dr. Markus Becker; Professorin Dr. Cornelia Denz; Dr. Irina Sens
• Subject Area: Optics, Quantum Optics and Physics of Atoms, Molecules and Plasmas
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 558452925

Among the sciences, physics takes a central position, as it investigates fundamental phenomena in order to describe them in laws and models, usually requiring considerable experimental and measurement efforts. Physics research is characterised by a large range of research fields and methods that it reflected in an equally large range between fundamental research and application-oriented research and development. This top-level research requires comprehensive and high-quality specialised information, which the basic services offered by information infrastructures such as university libraries can provide only partially. In particular, physics is lacking in structures of community participation, which could foster a long-term engagement of researchers for subject-specific information infrastructures. FID Physik aims at filling this role by providing a comprehensive and central access point to distributed information pertinent to physics research. The target audience of FID Physik comprises all researchers in physics as well as persons working with physics-related scientific information. At first, developments are going to be customised towards the directly integrated use case of plasma physics as our pilot community. In a next step, a transfer takes place to the neighbouring disciplines of atomic and molecular physics, optics, photonics, and quantum technology. Finally, all sub-disciplines of physics are going to be considered. From the outset, the services of FID Physik are going to be designed such that they can be adapted to the full breadth of physics. Our priority is to meet the documented needs of physics research. Thus, we are directly collaborating with researchers in low temperature plasma physics as our immediate use case. Furthermore, we place a strong emphasis on community engagement. The pivotal product of FID Physik is going to be a search and service portal for literature research and as a guidance for subject-specific information and research-supporting services. Our search portal is going to provide users an added benefit by leveraging developments for several modes of search (e.g., improved search within knowledge graphs, an answer system based on a large language model, the search using ranges of physical quantities). Expressive, high-quality metadata form the basis of information retrieval. By improving the terminology of physics through subject modelling and by enhancing metadata connection between different types of research information, we are going to raise their findability and enable researchers to assess their quality more reliably. Thus, FID Physik is contributing to the Open Science transformation and Good Research Practice.

• DFG Programme: Acquisition and Provision (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)