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When it comes to maths collaboration online, the mathematicians seem to be very well organised. A recent example is Polymath8 from Terence Tao's blog:

The main objectives of the polymath8 project, initiated back in June, were to understand the recent breakthrough paper of Zhang establishing an infinite number of prime gaps bounded by a fixed constant {H}, and then to lower that value of {H} as much as possible. After a large number of refinements, optimisations, and other modifications to Zhang’s method, we have now lowered the value of {H} from the initial value of {70,000,000} down to (provisionally) {4,680}, as well as to the slightly worse value of {14,994} if one wishes to avoid any reliance on the deep theorems of Deligne on the Weil conjectures.

Googling "polymath project" returns results dedicated to math collaboration, whereas "polyphysics project" returns nothing of interest.

Are there examples of online physics collaboration similar to polymath for mathematicians?

Larry Harson
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    Related: http://physics.stackexchange.com/q/7809/2451 – Qmechanic Aug 17 '13 at 19:36
  • To have such collaborations for physics issues too would be interesting, +1 – Dilaton Aug 17 '13 at 19:42
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    There was some discussion before, and someone propose the study of something like "why hot water freeze faster than cold water". Cant find in the moment, but related discussion: http://physics.stackexchange.com/q/1599 and http://meta.physics.stackexchange.com/q/460 – unsym Aug 17 '13 at 20:48

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This is a part answer, as it seems that this kind of collaboration is topic based and in a lot of cases, cross-disciplinary. These seem to be based on sharing the resources and expertise each member institutions have. Here are a few examples:

An example from the University of Sydney's Radiation Physics Laboratory, also is an example of an international cross-disciplinary collaboration.

The STAR experiment is an international collaboration focussing on:

Observation of an Energy-Dependent Difference in Elliptic Flow between Particles and Antiparticles in Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions

A specific example is the Remote Collaboration Program from the University of South Carolina

One avenue that has been used is social media, such as The University of British Columbia's Department of Physics and Astronomy,

The research group I am associated with has an international collaborative group in a private group on Facebook (for UV Atmospheric Physics), and I know of a couple of other groups that are similar.