Urgent: request to support the Leibniz Institute for Solar Physics (KIS)

Annnonce transmise par Sami Solanki (MPS Allemagne), Nicolas Labrosse (Univ Glosagow, UK), Thierry Appourchaux (IAS)

Dear Colleague,
 

As you may have heard, the senate of the Leibniz Association has recommended the German Federal Government and the German States, primarily the State of Baden-Württemberg, to end their common funding for the Leibniz Institute for Solar Physics (KIS, formerly known as Kiepenheuer Institute for Solar Physics) in Freiburg, Germany.

The recommendation of the Leibniz Senate reads: "The Senate of the Leibniz Association recommends that the Federal and State Governments  terminate the joint funding of the KIS as an institution for research and scientific infrastructure on the basis of the WGL implementation agreement ." (WGL = Wissensgemeinschaft Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz e.V. = full name of Leibniz Association)

This comes as a great shock to all of us, as KIS has for many years been a leading solar physics institute in both theoretical and observational aspects. This step comes very unexpectedly also because a recent independent scientific evaluation rated the scientific performance of different parts of KIS to be in the range good to excellent. The loss of KIS would hit our community very hard, undoing much of the progress in solar physics in the past years and setting back plans for the future of the field. We as members of the solar and heliospheric community and related fields must speak up to ensure that KIS continues to be funded sufficiently also in the future.

Therefore, we would like to ask you to write a letter to the relevant ministers stating your support for KIS and asking for its funding to be continued, if possible at its current level and ideally with KIS remaining with the Leibniz Association. If at all possible, please provide reasons for this. That will make your letter more valuable. In particular, any information on how the role of KIS is of relevance for your own research or that of your institute and how a closure of KIS would have a negative impact on your own or your institute's work would be helpful. Deadlines, addresses and more information on KIS, which may help you with your letter, are provided below.

We hope to receive a strong recommendation from you in support of continuation of funding for KIS. Should you have questions, do not hesitate to contact us at:  kis-support@tls-tautenburg.deor by writing directly to the signatories.

We apologise in case you receive multiple mailings on this topic, as we are using multiple mailing lists and colleagues may also forward our request on their own.
We would also like to draw your attention to a petition we have started in the same cause. It can be found under the following link:

 https://www.openpetition.eu/!kis

You are obviously free to write a letter (which will have a stronger influence), or simply sign the petition, or ideally do both.

Thank you very much for giving our request the necessary consideration.
 
Sincerely yours,

Laurent Gizon, Markus Roth, Sami K. Solanki, Klaus Strassmeier

 IMPORTANT DEADLINES

Ideally, your letter should reach the ministers by July 31, because on August 4 representatives of the two ministries (regional and federal) will meet to discuss how to proceed. Letters reaching the ministries before that date will have the largest impact.

We realize that this is at very short notice, in particular in light of the current holiday season. Therefore, if you cannot write a letter prior to that date, you can still make a significant difference if your letter reaches the ministries sufficiently before August 24, when the ministries produce a written report to the decision-making interministerial committee.
Letters reaching the ministries even after August 24 will still be useful, as a final decision will take somewhat longer.
 
 

       ADDRESSEES    

Your letter should be addressed to the two ministers, whose ministries are currently providing the funding for KIS. The two letters can be identical, except for the addresses.  

HOWEVER, please send the letters to the email address:   

kis-support@tls-tautenburg.de
Do NOT send it directly to the ministries or ministers.
We will collect all letters arriving by either of the deadlines and forward them to both the ministries.
 

Federal Ministry of Education and Research:
Bettina Stark-Watzinger
Bundesministerin
Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung
 

Ministry of Science, Research and Arts of the State of Baden-Württemberg:
Petra Olschowski
Ministerin
Ministerium für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kunst Baden-Württemberg
 

      SOME FACTS ABOUT KIS

These may help you with your letter (but please avoid using them 1-to-1, or the value of your letter will be lowered). In your letter you could also stress that with the planned change of leadership and the improved scientific strategy that this will bring, KIS is in an excellent position to continue playing a big role in solar physics in Europe and worldwide.

KIS is a solar physics research institute with 70 employees, including 26 scientists. The KIS mission is understanding the fundamental physical processes in the solar atmosphere and interior using instrumental, observational and theoretical tools. It operates two high-resolution telescopes, GREGOR and VTT, and one full disk telescope, ChroTel, at the Observatorio del Teide (OT) in Tenerife. GREGOR is the largest European solar telescope and is operated together with partners in Germany, and with contributions by Spain and Switzerland. KIS provides state-of-the-art observing opportunities to the European solar community via dedicated access programs.

KIS has an internationally recognised expertise in adaptive optics, image stabilization systems, and tunable spectropolarimetric imagers in high-resolution solar physics. KIS contributes instruments for ground-, balloon-, and space-based telescopes. KIS scientists contribute significantly to the theory of the solar dynamo and radiative magnetoconvection, physics of sunspots, atmospheric waves and the development of state-of-the-art MHD (CO5BOLD and Pencil Code) as well as free and open-source Stokes inversion codes (VFISV, Firtez-dz) for the benefit of the community.

The Science Data Center (SDC) of KIS provides science-ready observational data from the GREGOR telescope and will serve as a European mirror of the DKIST data center. Furthermore, it is coordinating efforts to integrate solar data in the EOSC (European Open Science Cloud) and PUNCH (Particles, Universe, NuClei, and Hadrons) project of the NFDI (National Research Data Infrastructure).

KIS scientists are fostering new generations of astrophysicists by teaching astrophysics courses, providing an observational experience to students, and supervising bachelor, master, and Ph.D. theses. Many scientists in leading positions worldwide were educated at KIS.

It is a time of changes for KIS. Oskar von der Lühe retired on March 31, 2022 and Svetlana Berdyugina is leaving the institute on September 30, 2023. In the meantime, a new director, Hardi Peter, has been selected. However, the negotiations were not fully completed when the information about the Leibniz Senate's recommendation was made public. The Leibniz Senate states that the institute is in a weakened state at the moment. However, we believe that the selected new director, Hardi Peter, brings all the attributes to be very successful in that capacity. He is the right person to address the weaknesses identified by the Leibniz senate and to lead KIS into a bright future.

KIS is presently involved in a number of national and international infrastructure projects:

·   KIS operates the largest European solar telescope GREGOR as well as the VTT with AIP and MPS as domestic minor partners and with contributions by international partners (IAC, IRSOL).

·   KIS is close to completing the largest imaging spectropolarimeter, VTF, for the largest solar telescope, DKIST, in Hawaii (in partnership with NSO, MPS and IRSOL).

·   KIS coordinates the SOLARNET project funded by the EU with ~10MEuro. In it, 33 European and two non-European institutes coordinate their efforts in research activities and transnational access to telescopes and supercomputing facilities.

·   KIS develops Multi-Conjugate Adaptive Optics (MCAO) systems and is presently installing a system with five deformable mirrors at the GREGOR telescope. The existing MCAO system at GST (BBSO, USA) and the concept for the DKIST MCAO are achievements that can be traced back to developments at KIS.

·   KIS contributed the correlation tracker and wavefront sensor for the SUNRISE stratospheric observatory, which are crucial for achieving the highest possible image quality.

·   KIS contributed to the ESA/NASA mission Solar Orbiter with an image stabilization system for the Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI).

·   KIS is involved in data infrastructure activities within European (ESCAPE, EOSC) and national (NFDI, PUNCH4NFDI) projects.

·   KIS scientists are deeply involved in specifying the scientific requirements and providing a concept for the data centre for the planned 4 m European Solar Telescope (EST).

·   KIS scientists actively develop and maintain data reduction pipelines (level-0) and data analysis tools (level-1) to transform raw spectropolarimetric data into magnetic field data-products and provide these tools for free to the entire solar physics community.