Arfor Houwman from Francesca Ferlaino's team turned his research topic into a music video and won the international “Dance Your PhD” competition in the categories physics and AI/quantum physics with his entry “Collective Phenomena in Ultracold Dipolar Quantum Gases”.
“What topic are you writing your doctoral thesis on again?” Young academics know the question – from parties, family gatherings and cozy evenings with friends. While you are still starting to explain, it is important to find out how interested they really are and how deeply you can delve into the subject matter before they suppress a yawn or only half-listen.
In this case, there is another way: this year, Science organized the “Dance your PhD” contest for the 17th time. The aim is to package the content and results of your own doctoral thesis in a four-minute dance video. At the next family celebration, the smartphone is then pulled out of the pocket and the friends not only remember the topic, but also a catchy tune.
This will also be the case for Arfor Houwman's circle of acquaintances: Houwman is a researcher in Francesca Ferlaino's research group. In his PhD thesis, he is working on laser cooling and ultracold atoms. He packaged this topic, which is not easy to explain, into a song and won the international competition in both the physics and AI/quantum physics categories.
“It may sound counter-intuitive, but to generate the coldest states there are, we need lasers,” explains Houwman. In the laboratory, various optical cooling and trapping techniques are used to cool atoms from 1400 K (approx. 1100 °C) down to 100nK.“That's about 10 million times colder than outer space,” describes the doctoral student.
Writing the lyrics was easy for him, but producing the music was much more time-consuming: “I really wanted to produce the song in the synthwave style that was often used in noir films in the 80s and 90s, for example in Blade Runner and The Terminator,” explains the physicist. There are also allusions to the movie The Matrix in the video.