On May 15th at Treibhaus in Innsbruck, 8 slammers from the DK-ALM captivated a full house with their entertaining insights into their research topics and the daily life of a PhD student in Physics. They inspired the enthusiastic audience and perhaps encouraged them to study physics in the future.
The first slam was a non-competitive presentation by Roland, the speaker of the DK ALM. He celebrated the 25th anniversary of his doctoral thesis with us on stage and brought along his doctoral hat. The hat, crafted by his former colleagues, features the molecule he studied during his thesis research.
In his action-packed slam entitled “How does a physicist prepare an entangled fruit salad?”, Isaac squeezed and cut real fruits on stage, to finally entangle them to a fruit salad with the help of the children’s song “fruitsalad”.
Sarah, our second slammer, gave us insights into a day in the life of a PhD student in Physics by reading from her diary. Her slam, titled “Doktoratsstudium Physik: Weniger Genie, mehr Wahnsinn,” shared her experiences with her experimental setup, affectionately named Diva, and the challenges of finding motivation to write publications.
Yusuf connected Star Wars (not only the music J) to his research “What does Star Wars has to do with quantum dots”.
In Florian slam titled “Die Lichtgeige”, he used a stone, a lime, a violin and make-up mirror to visualise how communication in possible with the right tone.
Louis asked „How can light freeze atoms?” and then demonstrates his research with an egg carton. Here the eggs needed find their place in box following certain rules, first in a classical framework and then in the quantum world.
During the last slam entitled “Theoretical dreams, experimental realities: How to combine them?” Alberto, Arfor – two experimental physicists – and Elena – theoretical physicist- showed us that if the communication between theoretical and experimental researcher works something weird can happen.
After the slams the audience had to discuss in small groups to figure out the winner. Although the scores given were very close to each other the experimental & theorist team Arfor, Alberto and Elena won.
Thanks to Bernhard, who moderated the show.
Congratulation to all of you.
